Arts & Culture

ABU DHABI — Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism has set December 11 as the public opening date for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, five weeks from now. Frank Gehry, who died last year, designed the museum. It has ten sculptural cones, rising as high as 88 meters, around a central atrium and 30 galleries. The building totals 80,000 square meters, with 11,600 square meters of interior galleries and 23,000 square meters of outdoor exhibition space. The project was announced in 2006. Construction began in 2011 and was suspended for years before resuming in 2019. ArchDaily reports that the Abu Dhabi government has put more than $1 billion into construction. The government, not the Guggenheim Foundation, owns the collection, which has been assembled since 2009. It is arranged by themes such as Abstraction, Popular Culture and Land rather than by date, and it concentrates on art from the 1960s onward.

NEW YORK — Critic Jonathan Mandell's calendar lists eight Broadway openings this month. Wanted, a musical about the outlaw Clarke sisters, opens Sunday at the James Earl Jones Theatre. Here There Are Blueberries opens Monday at the Barrymore. It is Moisés Kaufman's play about a book of Nazi-era photographs found by a Holocaust Museum archivist. Downstate, Bruce Norris's play about convicted sex offenders in a group home, opens Nov. 15 at the Booth, directed by Joe Mantello. Mandell notes that Sen. Ted Cruz attacked it as normalizing pedophilia. The Fantasticks reaches Broadway for the first time on Nov. 16 in a Second Stage staging that recasts the young lovers as two adolescent boys, according to TDF. Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell star in Jamie Lloyd's Much Ado About Nothing on Nov. 19. Inter Alia, with Rosamund Pike, opens Dec. 1.

WASHINGTON — The Strand, the Manhattan bookstore, agreed to pay $1,482,560 to resolve False Claims Act allegations tied to a $932,350 second-draw Paycheck Protection Program loan, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced Tuesday. Prosecutors said the store applied in February 2021, when its controlling owner was Nancy Bass Wyden, wife of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. Federal law barred such loans to businesses controlled by a member of Congress or a spouse. Prosecutors said her certification on the application was knowingly and materially false. The settlement involved no determination of liability. A whistleblower suit filed by Blockquote Inc. prompted the case, and that company will receive about $148,256. The Strand called the mistake unintentional. It said the restriction was added between the program's two rounds and that its accountant and bank missed the change. It said the funds were returned once the problem was identified.

NEW YORK — The New York Times Book Review has ended its contract with Olivia Waite, who has written its monthly romance-fiction column since 2020, according to Waite's account published by the site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and relayed by Publishers Lunch. Waite says she reposted a Bluesky post criticizing the Times for not covering new rape allegations against President Trump. The allegations appear in a House Judiciary Committee Democrats' report. She says Book Review editor Tina Jordan then emailed to say the paper was no longer a good fit for her column. She also says the Times acknowledged monitoring her posts. Her account has not been independently confirmed, and the Times' own explanation was not part of the coverage reviewed. A Substack newsletter by a media critic argues instead that Waite should have been dismissed earlier over undisclosed conflicts of interest. Romance authors and readers have protested the decision.

LOS ANGELES — Sony Pictures is releasing the Hindi-language epic 'Ramayana: Rise of a Legend' in North America as the film opens worldwide, around the Diwali holiday. Deadline reports that Thursday previews began at 3 p.m. in about 1,300 locations, the widest North American release for an Indian movie. The first part of Nitesh Tiwari's film is projected at about $6 million over four days in the U.S. and Canada. That is in line with Indian-language comparables such as 'Kalki 2898 AD' at $5.6 million. Sony is also expected to add about $6 million from select territories abroad, and the film plays in Imax and 3D. Early critical response is mixed: Deadline put it at 40 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes from ten reviews. Deadline describes the deal as a distribution arrangement for Sony, which does not handle the film in India.

LONDON — The BFI London Film Festival announced Wednesday that 'La Bola Negra', directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, won its Audience Award for Best Feature Film. Dependence, Grace Harper-Brighouse's documentary built from home movies about her father's addiction, took the award for Best British Discovery. The Hollywood Reporter notes the film earned Los Javis the best director prize at Cannes this year and has emerged as a real challenger to 'The Odyssey' in the best picture race. It also won the international audience award at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Deadline reports it has grossed about $43 million worldwide, making it Spain's highest-grossing local film of 2026 and the country's official Oscar entry. The festival's juried winners, announced October 18, included Sergei Loznitsa's 'Imperium' for best film.

ORLÉANS, France — Mizuki Ono of Japan, 30, won the 17th Orléans International Piano Competition, the only major international piano contest devoted exclusively to music written since 1900. She took the ORCOM Foundation-Blanche Selva First Prize, worth €12,000, plus the Elliott Carter Prize and the Henri Dutilleux-Geneviève Joy Residency. Carter Muller, an American-Dutch pianist, won second prize along with the Audience Prize and the André Boucourechliev Prize. Shan-Chi Hsu of Taiwan took third. Ono is from Aichi and studied composition at Tokyo University of the Arts before turning to piano. This year's edition was the adult one, open to pianists up to 36. Founded in 1994, the competition alternates with a junior version. Composition prizes were shared by Maria Vittoria Agresti and Arseniy Gusev.

SHANGHAI — American soprano Emma Marhefka and Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi won the first prizes at Operalia 2026, which ran from October 26 to November 1 at the Shangyin Opera House in Shanghai. Each received $30,000 and a Rolex watch as audience-prize winners. Marhefka also took the Pepita Embil Prize of Zarzuela. Second prizes went to American soprano Tessa McQueen, who shared the Birgit Nilsson Prize with British tenor Robert Lewis, and to South Korean baritone Junhyeok Felix Park. Ukrainian bass Roman Chabaranok took third. Both winners are in the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. Marhefka sings Pamina at the Met next month, according to French opera site Ôlyrix. Nayden Todorov conducted the Shanghai Conservatory orchestra in the final, which was streamed on medici.tv.

NEW YORK — Sonya Yoncheva's performance in the title role of Cherubini's Medea at the Metropolitan Opera drew strong praise from OperaWire's David Salazar, who made the case that it could be the performance of the season. He wrote that her voice carried over the orchestra throughout the evening. He also praised her even range, from a potent chest voice to high notes, and her ability to convey the character's psychology, including quiet pianissimo singing in her pleas to Jason and Creon. The review was less kind to the pit and stage at the start. The overture sounded blurred and uniform in volume, the opening chorus was ragged, and the soloist and conductor were not always together in Glauce's aria. Medea is on stage for most of the opera and alone for much of it, which makes the role physically punishing.