ART: This past Friday The NY Times dubbed the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind "exhilarating". Now opened, as of yesterday, we highly recommend stepping inside and delving into the world of flying cars, future software and 200 examples of "successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design." You can also check it all out online. 10:30am to 5:30pm //......

They’ll deny it, but most college students who write plays harbor some secret fantastic hope that their new opus will be hailed as the arrival of a fresh new voice and open on Broadway to triumphant acclaim. It obviously never happens, except when it does: 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, originally from Washington Heights, conceived the musical In the Heights as a sophomore at Wesleyan. After graduating, the show, a hip hop and salsa-inflected homage to his......

RENT, the surprise smash hit musical that premiered in 1996 and went on to become the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history, will close June 1st, producers have announced. Over the years the show cultivated a fanatical army of young repeat viewers (“Rentheads”) whose ardor has translated into profits of $280 million on Broadway, four Tony awards and a Pulitzer. Productions have been mounted on six continents, while an ill-conceived movie version of the show, filmed......

In The Brothers Size, three shirtless black men struggle for scraps of peace and prosperity under the blazing sun of some unnamed, dirt poor southern town. Ogun and Oshoosi Size are two recently reunited brothers – the older, more responsible Ogun has taken Oshoosi in after he’s released from prison. Oshoosi makes a halfhearted go at rehabilitation working at Ogun’s auto-body shop, at least until the appearance of his old jailbird buddy Elegba, who surfaces......

Having already seen one of this season’s most anticipated Broadway plays, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, we haven’t been yet been personally disappointed by the Local One stagehands’ strike. While we sympathize with the union and the theatrical community that’s now out of work, we’re not exactly losing sleep over tourist tweens missing out on Legally Blonde for a few days. Now, however, we’re really starting to sweat it: though talks will resume this weekend,......

Back before the turn of the century, and concurrent with the spread of air conditioning in Off-Off Broadway theaters, theater buffs John Clancy and Elena K. Holy seized a golden opportunity to exploit the only brief lull in New York’s raging theater scene – when conventional wisdom held that no slob stuck in town during mid-August would want to get stickier in a stuffy theater up two flights of stairs. And so The New York......

MUSIC: Tickets are still available for Daniel Johnston tonight. If you aren't familiar with the music of this Austinite, check out a little of what he has to offer from a recent appearance on the Henry Rollins Show (video here), or in the documentary "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," trailer below: 7pm // Warsaw [ 261 Driggs Ave , Brooklyn] // $18 PARTY: LVHRD is having their "MCFGHT 2 AUDITIONS" tonight. The mysterious bunch of......

The Receipt, a charmingly subversive play by a pair of brilliant blokes in town for the Brits Off Broadway festival, is framed by a future archeologist’s analysis of one Alan Wiley, a contemporary Londoner – though colleagues believe the city may have been called something like Glondon – and his strange, quixotic quest to find the “owner” of a receipt that he picks up on the street. The story is the right-brain child of Will......

American counterculture and literary idol, Kurt Vonnegut, died yesterday at the age of 84. He was in Manhattan, and his death was the result of brain injuries from a fall several weeks ago. Vonnegut came to New York in 1947, moving to Schenectady and taking a job with General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and moved with his family to Cape......

The trend for Broadway shows to be based on popular films continues unabated but this twist reported in Variety today is actually kinda cool. The production team of George Reinblatt, Christopher Bond and Frank Cipolla will be opening Off Broadway Evil Dead: The Musical based on the 1981 cult classic horror flick by Sam Raimi. It'll be directed by Bond and Hinton Battle, who also choreographed the show. Tying in with the Midnight Movie plot......

The weather outside might be just starting to feel like spring, but in the theater world there’s already a summery vibe going on. Last night the Lortel Awards kicked off the trophy-giving season; this Friday the Drama League awards go out. Then there’s the festivals; not that there aren’t festivals at other times of the year, but as the weather heats up they start crowding in thick and fast. Currently you can get a square......

If the lead of a play or musical is sick and an understudy performs instead, can you ask for your money back? I'm especially interested in knowing about cases where the lead performer is a big star. It all depends on how that star is billed in the show, so check your Playbill or the theater's marquee for clues. For example, both Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane are listed above the title in the......

Tic and Tac, Street Performers...

Sara Dobbs, Actress/Singing Waitress...

Gothamist can always get a sense of what shows are crash & burning and which are just plain sizzling by an occasional perusal of the theater tickets for sale/wanted listings on the oh mighty list o Craig. A browse today tells us the following: Billy Crystal is gonna make a killing on his new solo show 700 Sundays. The reviews kicked butt, and here is someone selling a pair for $500 bucks. Ouch, that's steep.......

Gothamist loves a good sale, so when we heard about the Theater Development Fund costume sale, our eyes got all big and buggy. TDF is the non-profit organization behind the TKTS booth, and they do many other great endeavors which promote theater and the arts. From Tuesday Oct. 26 through Thursday Oct. 28, they will be clearing out twenty thousand professional quality theatrical costumes during the TDF Costume Collection's “Moving Sale”. These are described as......

Showcases are pretty standard nowadays, especially in the realm of Off-Off Broadway. The big idea, of course, is for several new playwrights to get together with short plays that are as yet unproduced, split the costs and consolidate the potential audience. In a showcase environment, the plays usually have something in common, and it's frequently thematic. Perhaps they all deal with love, loss, or death. In the case of the new showcase at manhattantheatresource, it's......

With the Tony nominations announced yesterday, everyone is buzzing about Wicked (this year's uneven and "quirky" Tony story; will Kristen and Idina cancel each other out?), Bombay Dreams (a little Andrew Lloyd Webber Schadenfreude), how Puffy wasn't nominated but the three other actresses all were (when you get "meh" reviews, what does he expect - this isn't the MTV Video Music Awards) and how hunky Hugh Jackman is...and they talk about how the Times's public......