1. Sofia Vergara will play a Mexican brothel madame in “Machete Kills,” which will also star Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Amber Heard, Mel Gibson, and of course, Danny Trejo as “Machete.” [Variety]

2. Production for “All Is By My Side,” the Jimi Hendrix biopic starring Andre 3000, will begin next month. [The Playlist/Indiewire]

3. TNT is sticking with “Southland”: The network will beging airing season five next February. [Inside TV/EW]

4. Fox has retitled “Neighborhood Watch,” the Ben Stiller movie about dads who fight aliens, to “The Watch,” in order to avoid any association with the killing of Trayvon Martin. [Reuters]

5. “Adam Yauch … was one of the best things to happen to American indie cinema in years”: Manohla Dargis remembers Yauch as the co-founder of Oscilloscope Pictures. [ArtsBeat/NYT]

Previously: D’Angelo, Jody Hill, Earl Sweatshirt, Notorious B.I.G., and Ryan Murphy

The Greek art market, like the country's economy at large, is reeling. The latest victim is Athens's biggest art fair, Art-Athina. This year's edition of the annual event — which was launched in 1993 by the Hellenic Art Galleries Association and drew some 58 international exhibitors from nine countries last year — had been canceled.

"Art-Athina is reassessing its strategy," director Alexandros Stanas told the Financial Times, "taking into consideration the latest facts in [the] economy and the country in general." The fate of the fair, which typically takes place in mid-May, remains uncertain. Its 2012 cancelation is just the latest blow to the local art economy, which seemed to be bound for glory when gallery mogul Larry Gagosian opened an outpost in Athens back in 2009.

An article this weekend in the Greek newspaper TO BHMA noted grimly that Art-Athina has been a reliable barometer of the country's art market for nearly two decades. "After the collapse of Greece's economy, why not its art too?," asks Vlassis Frissiras, a collector and owner of the Frissiras Museum. "The collapse of [the art market] is a corollary of our cultural collapse. Collecting art is a luxury business, and a financial meltdown has tempered collectors' willingness to buy. If you take a look at the art galleries, you will see how squeezed they are. Many are on the verge of closing."

In the same article, the sentiment is echoed by Ileana Tounta, owner of the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, who faults the Greek art market for being too inwardly focused and — despite international events like Art-Athina — being overly reliant on domestic collectors, rather than promoting its artists to a more international set of collectors. "It is difficult however to promote Greek artists abroad," Tounta said. "There is so little outward promotion of their work, so very few people outside Greece know modern and contemporary Greek art."

Unfortunately the cancelation of Art-Athina has come at a moment when an international event promoting the country's contemporary art was more badly needed than ever. As Tounta concluded: "Our artistic scene cannot remain so isolated at a time of such internationalism."

If the recent repudiation at the box office of “The Five-Year Engagement” suggests that men and women have tired of the post-Apatow fusion of chick flicks and dick jokes (Apatow’s ideal in its most watered down — or perhaps most overpowering — state), then “The Dictator,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s send-up of a Qaddafi-like strongman, should be arriving at precisely the right time. Add to this the fact that the ascension of Kim Jong-un, deposing of Muammar Qaddafi, and defeat of Saddam Hussein remain fresh even in our darting American minds, and the film should have a lock on the zeitgeist.

And this is fertile crescent for cinema. Instead of another attempt to take the everyday romantic and professional lives of white Americans over the top, you have a movie that treats unimaginably absurd and awful rulers absurdly, putting humor to the use that any “comedy fan” will tell you it is best applied: processing darkness, disaster, and pain.

Despite all this — and despite the presence of Anna Farris, Hollywood’s great mistress of the absurd — the unrated trailer for the “The Dictator” just feels crude and unfunny. The movie seems to rely on the same fish-out-of-you-know-what formula that all of Cohen’s cringers have, an easy out that means a host of low-budget-like references to the life the character is supposed to embody. The dick-joke side of the equation puts it in a category with any post-Apatow flick you’d like to name. The feminist angle — Faris seems to play one — promises a little more than the average doughy-dude vehicle does, but it could just be one big dick joke in itself. We suspect Cohen has greater ambitions. But if the best this movie can do is summon some broad humor about gender skirmishes in the west, you might as well stamp a great, saggy, Jason Segel sad-face on the whole damn thing.

Buckle up for more rumors in the BMW world. The usual and old-time suspect Scott27, returns with more rumors, but this time, the speculations go beyond what we have seen so far. If news around an M2 or front-wheel-drive are starting to make sense and...

No one who cares about arts journalism disputes that it is in trouble. Jobs are being lost, content has been thinned, and investigative reporting and long-form writing are losing emphasis. Earlier this month, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the winners of the highly-anticipated Knight Foundation 2012 Community Arts Journalism Challenge, each of whom will be receiving $80,000 to launch "innovative ideas for informing and engaging people in the arts." The program was meant to seed ideas that could become sustainable new models for art writing. It's a laudable goal, and it comes as no surprise that the reaction to the grants has been, as far as I can tell, altogether positive.

On the surface of things, the proposals for "new models" of art coverage that won the Challenge will indeed broaden arts journalism's audience and perhaps even help smaller communities feel more connected to the local ecosystem of arts and culture. There's ample reason to doubt, however, that the winners of the Challenge will save the profession as a whole from crisis. In fact, they may even make the problem worse.

First, let's talk about what the winners are proposing. The Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance will use their grant to share content and column space among local publications covering the arts, and train their staff to write about the arts more intelligently. A similar content-sharing arrangement called Art Attack will be supported in Philadelphia between the Philadelphia Daily News and Drexel University. Finally, in Detroit, a NEA-funded mobile video booth called CriticCar will travel around the city and give folks the opportunity to record their own reviews of arts events. "The forces of media tend to appeal only to the readers they already have," CriticCar co-creator Dan Shaw told NPR. "We wanted to allow everybody to offer a critique of a cultural event, to make people think of all the different cultural institutions as part of one big community."

If they want to survive, members of the art journalism profession must look for ways to adapt themselves to the new order, one in which information is shared and criticism is democratized. As even my cursory summary suggests, the models awarded by the Knight grants have potential for addressing this — but they do little to validate the work of the talented, energetic people who make arts journalism their livelihood, or to make it more sustainable as a profession.

While the idea of training writers to be more intelligent about the subject has promise, and some journalists or would-be journalists in Charlotte and Philadelphia might be grateful for the increased exposure that the content-sharing agreements between institutions might potentially bring, they won't benefit nearly as much as their publishers, who will find themselves better able to create economies of scale. Sharing content is a way to allow publishers to do more with less ("The Daily News is not paying for content, but they're providing the real estate in the paper, which has some cost and, obviously, their editors are involved," Drexel University's Jason Wilson told NPR.) It is unlikely to produce a particular boom in arts writing jobs, then. 

But the project that really stands out is the CriticCar, where the undermining of professional arts journalism is pretty much-head on. By suggesting that the opinion of a crowd-sourced critic is no more valid (or trivial) than that of an expert, it's hard to imagine how the latter party could justify being paid. The whole reason why some people are paid rather than others, presumably, is that some people have invested the time and effort into learning more about a subject than the average reader. To win a place for professionals, the public must somehow be convinced that not all opinions are equally illuminating.

Institutions receiving support from the Knight Foundation are dedicated to two of arts journalism's primary objectives: distributing high-quality content (in Charlotte and Philadelphia) and engaging the non-art community (in Detroit). If the profession hopes to survive in the digital age, then it's crucial that these not be conflated with another important goal: Intelligent and capable arts journalists must be given the financial support they need to survive.

NEW YORK — It is indeed an imaginary happening — Miuccia Prada sits at one end of an ornate black lacquer Baroque dining table, while the late Elsa Schiaparelli, played by actress Judy Davis, sits on the other. Crystal decanters stand at the center and a water goblet and champagne flute are in place in front of each woman. A crystal chandelier hangs above them and immaculately-framed artworks serve as the backdrop.

“You know, Miuccia, I hate talking to designers,” says Schiaparelli. “It’s the worst, so this impossible conversation is like an exception.”

The fantastical Baz Luhrmann-directed scene of banter between the two designers covers an entire wall at the entrance of “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute on May 10. Inspired by the 1981 movie “My Dinner With Andre,” this Prada and Schiaparelli dialogue is the first in eight short films that serve as the backbone for the exhibition. Instead of theater, which was the main topic of conversation in “My Dinner With Andre,” Prada and Schiaparelli talk about the thread that connects them — fashion.

The conversations were culled from excerpts of Schiaparelli’s 1954 autobiography “Shocking Life” and from Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton’s interviews with Prada. Each talk acts as a centerpiece for a corresponding section of the exhibition, highlighting the topics the two agree on and disagree on, from women’s bodies to their views on the relationship between art and fashion.

“I try to make the men more human and the women more powerful,” Prada tells Schiaparelli.

“Men respect a strong woman,” Schiaparelli responds.

In the section “Waist Up/Waist Down,” a winter 1938-39 Schiaparelli black silk velvet cape embroidered with an image of Apollo made from sequins beads and yellow rhinestones is paired with a fall/winter 2007 Prada orange skirt of plastic fringe, feathers, silk twill, and black wool felt. The mannequin’s faces are covered with lucha libre-like masks designed by Guido Palau, whose pieces adorn all the mannequins in the show.

In another part, Schiaparelli’s hats and necklaces are matched with Prada’s shoes, like Schiaparelli’s winter 1937-38 Dalí-inspired shoe headpiece and Prada’s spring 2012 red, black, and white patent leather flamed wedges. A circa 1938 Schiaparelli red silk velvet and gold bow necklace hangs atop a chunky-heeled purple and yellow suede shoe with a black leather ankle strap from Prada’s spring/summer 2008 collection.

In the final section, Prada ensembles are displayed with old photographs of starlets wearing Schiaparelli, each pair enclosed in a Plexiglas box. The final film features the two bickering about whether art is fashion. “Fashion is art,” says Schiaparelli. For Prada, there is no sense in calling a fashion designer an artist. “I think you have to do your job,” she tells Schiaparelli. “Who cares about the title.”

The conversation ends in an agreement. “If we lived together at the same time would we be friends?” asks Schiaparelli. The two come to the consensus that yes, they would.

“Prada’s work modernizes Schiaparelli’s and enlivens it and Schiaparelli’s provides a context for Prada, so I think it’s that synergy between that approach, which in a way, enlivens both the work of the two women,” Bolton told ARTINFO.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from “Schiaparelli and Prada: Imaginary Conversations,” on view at the Met’s Costume Institute from May 10 to August 19.

America is fast becoming a pop-up nation. From sea to shining sea, her cities have been swept up in the frenzy for temporary architecture: Brooklyn vendors sell their wares in artfully arranged shipping containers; Dallas's Build a Better Block group champions DIY painted bicycle routes and pop-up small businesses; architects in San Francisco are repurposing metered parking spaces into miniature parks; residents in Oakland, California rallied to create an entire pop-up neighborhood. The phenomenon has even climbed its way from grassroots origins to the agendas of local authorities: D.C.'s office of planning sprouted a Temporary Urbanism Initiative, while New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is implementing what she calls "Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses" with her fast-acting interventions favoring pedestrians and cyclists. The temporary, so it seems, is overtaking the permanent. But how permanent is our current fascination for the temporary?

There is a natural tension within the term "temporary architecture" that makes the notion seem vaguely unstable. To understand the significance of this fact, it helps to go back to the lessons of Vitruvius. The prolific architect and scribe of antiquity imparted three principal virtues, among other things, unto the Western architects that would fall under his influence: utilitas, firmitas, and venustas. The meaning of these terms is subject to much debate, but semantics aside, Vitruvius's virtues roughly translate to "utility," "durability," and "beauty." With these virtues firmly in place, Vitruvius equated the Roman empire's commanding marble cities with built perfection. The monuments that he extolled in the 1st century BC are an unmistakable tribute to the import of permanence.

But for centuries now, this association of great architecture with fixed and timeless permanence, along with the entire Vitruvian triad, has been losing traction. Our environment has been built, altered, and rebuilt in overlapping waves. While some buildings stand the test of time, most seem to expire in relevance. Grand architectural and planning schemes are increasingly rare. In fact, we fast-forward to today, and it seems that we are collectively swinging towards a polar opposite of Vitruvian values. We are moving towards an architecture in which the permanent is becoming a lot less permanent.

Lydia DePillis, architecture and urban issues critic for the Washington City Paper, recently penned an article entitled "Temporary is the New Permanent." Her piece centers around a recent urban intervention in D.C., in which, for one weekend, a typically lifeless neighborhood in D.C. became the site of a bustling marketplace. People (white people, as DePillis emphasizes) flocked to the remote district by bicycle to sample food truck fare, listen to live music, and admire the work of local artists and artisans. The next Saturday, the streets were empty, as if it were all a dream. But when night fell, an entourage of D.C. youth came flooding into the area on chartered school buses to kick off a three-month-long arts event series called LUMEN8Anacostia.

This pop-up urban revival is but one example of an approach informally called "lighter, quicker, cheaper" (LQC) by members of New York’s Projects for Public Spaces (PPS). The organization pitches the phenomenon as a response to the strains of contemporary urban living: "As cities struggle to do more with less… we have to find fast, creative, profitable ways to capitalize on local ingenuity and turn public spaces into treasured community places." Enter the new triad of virtues: the light, the quick, and the cheap.

The LQC approach favors low-cost projects, incremental steps, and high levels of community engagement. Its implementation is widespread, ranging from pop-up marketplaces and pavilions to seemingly cosmetic but effective city planning reforms. Small budgets meet less resistance and allow for faster execution, which means the effects of these interventions can be felt more immediately. As a result, the schemes can be adapted as needed, responding quickly to the successes or failures of their forms. Moreover, these projects are often initiated by locals, diverse groups of individuals who can see the demands and aspirations of their respective communities firsthand. The results often become a more direct and intimate response to their sites.

Because of its low cost, modest appearance, and community-driven spirit, LQC architecture is often seen as a reflection of our times: this sudden infatuation for the temporary can be read as a pragmatic response to economic downturn as well as a material expression of the slow democratization of our cities.  But if and when current circumstances change, will cities abandon the temporary for more traditional solutions?

That is a difficult question to answer, as our conceptions of architecture are becoming increasingly unfixed. It seems that today’s architects, planners, and city dwellers are actively redefining the binary that distinguishes the temporary and the permanent. As we are seeing more and more, temporary architecture can be surprisingly permanent; Brooklyn's DeKalb Market and Oakland's Popuphood are two examples of essentially permanent interventions cloaked in the illusion of impermanence. Both projects are seen as "temporary" not because they are disposable, but because they are susceptible to instantaneous change at multiple points in time.

Conversely, temporary architecture that is objectively short-term but nonetheless strives for an illusion of permanence can be a thoroughly wasteful endeavor. Temporary, in this throwaway sense, risks enabling architects to disregard the specifics of their sites and build freely and thoughtlessly. The flippant pavilions and overwrought month-long constructions that result are not responsive to our times. Instead, they perpetuate the older, static notion of permanence, which has its place elsewhere. At their worst, these short-lived projects cling to an architect or patron's self-serving delusions of grandeur, and the public is left with only a burn image of a monument, a two-dimensional idea that can occasionally inspire but often merely conceals a serious drain on efforts and resources. With all this in mind, we can return to our initial question: Is the pop-up here to stay? That depends on whether the pop-up truly means to stay.

To see more images of the pop-up urban interventions mentioned in this piece, click on the slide show.

1. The case for Samuel L. Jackson as Hollywood’s most bankable star. [PopWatch/EW via CNN]

2. “Mad Men” paid $250,000 for the use, in the most recent episode, of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows.” [RS]

3. The Beach Boys, complete with Brian Wilson, performed last night on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Fallon also interviewed Wilson and Mike Love. [Stereogum]

4. J.J. Abrams will produce “Revolution,” a show about a world without energy, for NBC. [Vulture]

5. Watch Action Bronson perform while wading through a crowd of Princeton students. [Pigeons and Planes]

Previously: Sofia Vergara, Andre 3000, “Southland,” Ben Stiller, and Adam Yauch

Richard Branson has never been known for behaving conventionally; when he's not climbing Mount Everest or racing James Cameron to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he can be found in the desert touching beaming down to his Norman Foster-designed spaceport. And even at cruising altitude, the air and space tycoon is full of surprises. He recently unveiled the new Upper Class cabin that will start appearing in Virgin Atlantic airplanes. Part Dan Flavin light installation, part "Mad Men" mid-century cool, the glowing interiors designed by London-based practice VW+BS bring to mind a swinging '60s sex club transposed into the bright neon universe of "Tron." 

The $162 million interior redesign includes 1,000-crystal Swarovski curtains and an eight-foot-long bar, the world's largest inflight watering hole. Surprisingly, the bar's color palette is mostly neutral. The surface is a shade of off-white with a champagne lacquer finish, but the magic is in the RGB lighting embedded into the design. There are eight different color schemes to suit different moods, whether for bedtime or transitioning between time zones, but the default appears to be set on "sexy."

Next up on the list of elaborately-designed airplane cabins is Dutch super-designer Hella Jongerius for KLM. We've got high hopes for her rogue, colorful aesthetic in the air, but can it trump Branson's mile-high swingers' lounge?

Click the slide show to see more images of VW+BS's designs for the new Virgin Atlantic cabins.

This week, the New York Times will introduce a biweekly street style video, “Intersection: Where Culture Meets Style,” as part of a push for more on-the-corner fashion coverage. Today’s feature focuses on a stylist who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and is partial to clogs and her boyfriend’s sweaters.

For now it’s just this video series, but there is more to come. In an interview with WWD, the Times’ online fashion editor Simone Oliver said she wants to embrace the obsessive nature of street fashion blogs and apply it to the diversity of New York City. It’s a nod to the blogosphere’s fascination with endless scroll-enabled depositories of people walking the metropolises of the world, with a focus on the boroughs the Sartorialist never gets to.

The paper does, of course, already have its own rich background in the subject.

“I started photographing people on the street during World War II,” wrote Bill Cunningham, bard of the lens, in a story for the Times in 2002. “I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive. The problem is I’m not a good photographer … I just loved to see wonderfully dressed women, and I still do. That’s all there is to it.”

Cunningham’s On the Street column has been running in the Times for decades, but this street style vertical may be a new tack for the Gray Lady. The paper seems to be looking for inspiration from the blogs, Tumblr sites, and Instagram handles that have amassed large and loyal fan bases in the last few years.

“We’re slowly beefing up our team, as in, now we have two people who are trying to do more all the time,” Oliver said.

While details are still up in the air, this looks like another part of the gradual shift that has seen the methods of popular online-only shutterbugs move up to powerhouse media outlets.

Tommy Ton started the blog Jak & Jil, boosted his reputation enough to collaborate with Anna Dello Russo, and ended up — inevitably — as a GQ contributor. This has happened before. Scott Schuman, the guy behind the Sartorialist and perhaps the most prominent of the crew, also shot and edited a page each month for GQ from October 2006 to September 2009. And street photographer Garance Doré, a Frenchwoman inspired by Schuman (they are now dating), ended up shooting for French Vogue.

All of these photographers, with their meticulous work at Pitti Uomo or jaunts through the couture shows in Paris, are similar to Cunningham, but the ways in which they developed their fan bases — likes, reblogs, tweets — is not. These blogs have proven that a well-curated collection of pictures can bring in the page views. Doré was, at one point, getting 50,000 hits a day. Perhaps that’s another reason behind the general ramped-up approach to street style. Fifty thousand viewers each day is substantial even at the Times, and all extra traffic makes a difference.

Regardless of why the paper has decided to roll out all this new street style content, we’re glad that it will spotlight the outer boroughs. The next video will be set in Forest Hills, Queens, and that’s refreshing. We thought a blogger’s camera only worked around the traffic circles of Paris, by the ancient walls of Milan, or on the bent cobblestones of Crosby Street.

Director Diane Paulus loves a storm. A tempest figures prominently in “Amaluna,” her new Cirque du Soleil show in Montreal. And it is a hurricane which brings an ill wind to Catfish Row in her Broadway revival of “The Gershwins’ 'Porgy and Bess.'” While “Amaluna” (partly based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”) received mixed notices,  Paulus’s revival of the Gershwin folk opera has been showered with Tony nominations, including ones for her as Best Director, for the show as Best Revival, and Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis for their performances in the title role.

Paulus, a New York City native and Harvard graduate, is herself a whirlwind; she also serves as the artistic director of Boston’s prestigious American Repertory Theatre. That theater is very much in the news these days, having not only originated the revival of “Porgy  and Bess,” but also having hosted the pre-Broadway engagement of the new musical “Once,” which has also been recognized with numerous Tony nominations.  This fall, A.R.T. will present a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” to be directed by John Tiffany, the widely-acclaimed British artist behind the success of “Once” and “Black Watch.”  

Star-crossed love is something of a specialty of Paulus’s. She came onto on the scene with “The Donkey Show,” a disco-inspired re-telling of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that ran downtown for years. Long a veteran of experimental, operatic, and regional productions — often in collaboration with her husband Randy Weiner — she emerged onto the Great White Way with a Tony-winning hit revival of “Hair,” which she has now followed with “Porgy and Bess.”

Her fascination with tragic love notwithstanding, she is a product of what she describes as a most “miraculous” relationship. Her father, Laurence Paulus, a producer for CBS, was a just a “jovial GI” when he met and married her mother Teruko Uchida in American-occupied, post-World War II Japan. “It’s one of those stories of two people from opposite sides of the planet meeting each other and, against all odds, making it work,” she says, recalling that her mother left behind her disapproving family in Japan to come to America. Paulus spoke of how that seminal event may have influenced her work, especially in an opera like “Porgy and Bess,” which features another unlikely pairing.

You’ve often mentioned that an audience’s connection with the work is as important to you as the art that goes into it. In what way do you think the audience connects with this “Porgy and Bess”?
My interest was in creating a story that got you in your gut. We know the music will move us because the score is so gorgeous, but I knew the raw material was there to create a high-stakes drama in terms of the action of the show. To make that love story as real and powerful as possible you had to really get inside these two human beings, this most unlikely couple, the hottest girl on the block getting together with the beggar cripple.

And how do you do that?
It was all part of casting Audra and Norm and working with their very detailed investigation into the characters. While on the surface [Porgy and Bess] may be on the opposite ends of the spectrum, they’re absolutely mirroring each other in terms of having the courage to see each other, lending each other self-esteem for the first time in their respective lives. It is the most powerful and courageous thing a couple can do, to be that vulnerable. As an audience, we can relate to that because that’s what we want in our own lives.

Audra McDonald gives what can be described as a raw and “ugly” performance.
No question. We talked a lot about that, Audra and I. Bess is complicated, she’s struggling. And the audience loves her struggle. But it’s not an easy one, and [it is] full of foibles. Audra was very particular about the addiction. It was a real study for her. “Where am I in my addiction?” “How many days as it been?” “What does it mean not to have had happy dust in months and here [Sportin’ Life] is and he has a vial within two feet of me?” And one of my favorite moments is when she has happy dust in her hand, and Porgy calls her over and wipes the happy dust from her hand and they launch into “Bess, You Is My Woman.” We all crave the courage to see and be seen with grace and without judgment. These two characters have lived all their lives with labels: she’s “the liquor-guzzling whore” and he’s just “the cripple.” And their ability to look beyond the labels is profound.

And yet there appears to be an emphasis on Porgy not just as crippled but as a gambler in your version.
The line before Porgy enters is, “Here comes the old craps shark now. Now we’ll have a game.” Suzan Lori-Parks [who revised the libretto] and I would always talk about this. He’s a gambler and, in fact, a good one.  The stakes go up when Porgy enters the game. And that’s true of his relationship with Bess.

Do you think you’re drawn to the gamble that is love because of the way your parents met?
I have never thought of that parallel until now. My father was directing shows for the Army entertainment corps and my mother had just lost everything. Her mother and several members of the family had died, they had lost all their money, Japan was decimated. And here comes this jovial GI, fourteen years older, and my mother said that he made her smile for the first time in years. It’s not really a “Madame Butterfly” story. My mother’s family was in the import-export business and her father had been to America many times, she’d gone to a Quaker school in Tokyo. She spoke perfect English. But theirs was a forbidden love. There were anti-fraternization rules and they had a love shack that was raided by the army, their tomato plants were smashed and, of course, she could never bring this American home to her family in the aftermath of the war. They were a most unlikely couple.

Did the Uchida family ever come around?
In the next generation, yes. My mother left Japan, came to New York and none of her family recognized the marriage. But then when her sisters’ kids started intermarrying — a Jewish girl, a Southern belle, an Irish man — the family started to come around. And all because of the success of my parents’ marriage.

In what way does your Japanese ancestry influence your work?
Certainly in the aesthetics that my mother, who was a designer, imbued in me. When I was a child, she’d give me buttons and pieces of fabric and tell me to create a collage. She died in 1995, when I was in graduate school, but I feel like I carry her dignity, her grace, her stoicism. We grew up surrounded by Japanese masks on the wall, art, gorgeous dishes of every shape, color, and size at the breakfast table.  It was certainly part of our life.

Coming as you do from the experimental world, did you ever look down your nose on Broadway and the Tonys?
Oh, God, my father was a CBS TV producer and the network was broadcasting the Tonys so, no, they were always a big event in our house. Broadway in and of itself is not selling out.  It just allows you to reach many more people. When we were doing “The Donkey Show” down on Ludlow Street,  people would ask us, “Would you ever consider Broadway?” and I said, “We’ll go anywhere.” And I still feel that way. 

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