Noted and Blogged!

Maybe you've got the Nordic noir bug from reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium series (we've all seen those ubiquitous neon paperbacks on the subway) or were enthralled earlier by Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow or the Detective Wallander series of books. However you encounter them, Scandicrime writers such as Henning Mankell, Larsson, or Jo Nesbø are like a good bag of chips, it's hard not to have another. This is a selective guide to some notable authors and detective series from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and even some Nordic noir from Iceland, and what's better, a guide to pronouncing their names correctly over cocktails.

Nothing is more strange to man than his own image. —Dr. Alquist, sole survivor of the robot rebellion.

It's standard sci-fi melodrama now: The robots evolve and become indistinguishable from their creators. They rise up and in their revolt decide to eradicate the human race. Sound familiar? Well, before you start looking for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not 1984 and we're not in a movie theatre. The year is 1922 and it's all happening live on stage in an Off-Broadway theatre on 35th Street.

Judging from the teasers, Batman: The Dark Knight Rises promises to be another must-see summer movie, not least for the anticipation of Anne Hathaway's being cast as Catwoman. Anne has some impressive spandex to fill, however, against such feline luminaries as Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and and Michelle Pfeiffer, each with her own brand of Gotham catitude. Check out our treasury of vintage images of Catwomen from NYPL's Billy Rose Theatre Division and then take a sec and scratch your vote for the most purrfect Catwoman.

Charles Darwin died 130 years ago today, leaving an intellectual legacy which has profoundly influenced the general course of Western thought. He is best known for his work On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), both of which introduced radical new ideas for the time concerning the origins of humans and all life. Darwin's last work, however, devoted itself entirely to a more down-to-earth species: the lowly earthworm.

STAR TREK. The Musical! OK, not really, but even Mr. Spock would find fascinating what we dug up in the Library's Billy Rose Theatre Division about the original Star Trek actors before they went stellar. Who knew that Nichelle Nichols sizzled in the local cabaret scene before taking up her earpiece on the starship Enterprise? Or that George Takei was an activist (OK, not surprising), or that William Shatner, of Shatner's World; We Just Live in It..., first trod the Broadway boards over 50 years ago? Dust off your Klingon dictionary and stay tuned as we bring you the stage origins of Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and crew, and boldly go where 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever... — Keats

(quoted in opening night program, B. S. Moss' Coliseum Theatre, 1920)

The end of 2011 also brought the quiet demise of the last movie theater in Washington Heights, Coliseum Cinemas. Known to most residents as the RKO Coliseum, the large theater, occupying the entire corner of 181st and Broadway, has been a fixture of the neighborhood for over 90 years. As the community now debates the future of the Coliseum and nostalgia starts to kick in, let’s open this theater's historical file, found among the rich collections of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public 

This series is designed to showcase the often little-known stage background of popular TV and movie stars. In this installment, we'll explore the Broadway origins of the cast of I Love Lucy, including the secret life of Ethel Mertz!

Most New Yorkers, when asked to name NYC landmarks, will conjure up the familiar array of iconographic symbols that make up our city: the Statue Liberty, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Ground Zero Memorial, etc. — but having grown up in Washington Heights, I can’t help but place the George Washington Bridge among the great monuments of Gotham pride. Ever since its completion in 1931, this stunning suspension bridge has remained a sight that never gets old, one which seems so in harmony with its surroundings, and whose effortless beauty belies a remarkable feat of engineering.

We hereby announce the new blog series When They Trod the Boards, designed to highlight notable film or television actors who have a substantial background in stage work as documented in the collections of the Library's Billy Rose Theatre Division. We launch the series with John Lithgow and his new memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education,  published this week. Traditional books and ebooks are now flying off the Library's shelves! We’d like to highlight some of his shining moments on stage as reflected in our vast collection of stage photographs.

Lincoln Center is all abuzz as it ramps up for another Fashion Week. Fashion luminaries, hovering press reps, and harried show staff walk briskly across the Plaza towards the next scheduled event. The sense of anticipation is accompanied by the throbbing bass from the show tent, where models strut their stuff. For the in-crowd, the new look of tomorrow eclipses the desire to reflect on what has come before. But the scholars just next door in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts relish the past. While Lincoln Center has always been considered the locus of cultural history as-it-happens, it also harbors cultural artifacts of yesteryear stored nearby in the archives of LPA. 

Subject heading of the month: Eschatology.

Many of the NYPL's worldly readers may know that the end of the world concept, or eschatology (Dewey call number 236), has its own heading in the Catalog for readers who want to browse books, ebooks, and DVDs on the subject.

In the heart of Lincoln Center, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, nestled between the Metropolitan Opera and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, thrives in its role as a vibrant circuit between historical research and cutting-edge performance. And few researchers illustrate the Library's unique vitality for the performing arts community better than Ben West.

Ben West is a regular at LPA, where theatre professionals who shape the performing arts scene come for inspiration through their research in the LPA’s vast archives. Ben is the artistic director of UnsungMusicalsCo. Inc., and in that capacity he searches for lost musicals from Broadway’s golden age, 

Reserve your copy of the paperback (or ebook) now folks, because HBO's highly anticipated television adaptation of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones (which forms part of his unfinished Song of Ice and Fire series), the acclaimed fantasy billed as "The Sopranos in Middle-earth" (apologies to Tolkien), is set to air in April.

Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in the original stage production The King and I in 1951. This was Lawrence's last show, performing the role of Anna Leonowens up until the last few weeks before her death.