Arts & Culture

NEW YORK — Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities opens tonight, October 18, at the Hudson Theatre. John Benjamin Hickey directs a cast of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe. Billy Crystal's autobiographical solo show 860, about the family home lost in the Palisades fire, opens October 21 at the Imperial. The Imaginary Invalid, Bill Irwin's adaptation of Molière, opens October 22 at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men follows October 29 at the Vivian Beaumont. Bruce Norris's Downstate, directed by Joe Mantello, has again pushed back its first Broadway preview because of illness in the company. A Saturday performance was canceled, the first preview is now October 20 at the Booth, and the October 29 performance is also canceled. The announced November 15 opening night has not changed.

GHENT — Design Museum Gent reopened to the public on October 3 after a four-year renovation and expansion. London's Carmody Groarke and Ghent's ATAMA designed a new wing, and RE-ST restored the historic buildings. The 2,200-square-meter wing completes the fourth side of the museum's courtyard. It adds a public entrance on Drabstraat, a lecture room, a workshop, an event space and full step-free access. Its facade uses about 82,000 white bricks made from local construction and municipal waste. The designers say the bricks carry roughly a third of the embodied carbon of a standard Belgian clay brick. The complex now covers 8,600 square meters, including 3,700 of exhibition space, which the team says makes it Belgium's largest design museum. The reopening included a new collection presentation and the Design Fest Gent program, which ran to October 11.

STOCKHOLM — The Swedish Academy gave the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson on Oct. 8. It cited work that, in dialogue with the classical tradition, created new forms. The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. Two more prizes are close. The Booker Prize winner will be named Nov. 9 in London. The shortlist is M. John Harrison, Marlon James, Luke Kennard, Rebecca Perry, Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart. The winner receives £50,000. The National Book Foundation named 25 finalists on Oct. 6, chosen from 1,912 submissions. Fiction finalists include Edwidge Danticat's Dèy and Valeria Luiselli's Beginning Middle End, both from Knopf, and Morgan Thomas's Mad Eden from MCD. Winners will be announced in New York on Nov. 18.

NEW YORK — Freida McFadden's thriller The Witch is No. 1 on Publishers Weekly's list for the week of Oct. 19. It is her second hardcover original, and PW reports first-week print sales double those of 2025's The Intruder, which sold 65,000 copies in its first week. Barbara Kingsolver's Partita, her first novel since Demon Copperhead, debuted at No. 5 on the hardcover fiction list. Stephen King and the late Peter Straub are credited on Other Worlds Than These, which completes the Talisman trilogy and debuted at No. 3. Wm. Paul Young's Return to the Shack is at No. 8, and Veronica Roth's The Sixth Faction revisits her Divergent series. Releases on Oct. 13 included Elizabeth Kostova's Mystery Play (Ballantine), Stephen Graham Jones's Off the Reservation (Saga Press) and Becky Chambers's As You Wake, Break the Shell (Harper Voyager).

LOS ANGELES — Netflix laid off about 1,000 employees on Wednesday, roughly 6 percent of its workforce and its biggest cut since 2022, when about 450 jobs went. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters told staff most of the cuts fell on product, technology, legal and human resources. The film division was also hit. Vice president Doug Belgrad, a former Columbia Pictures president and film chief Dan Lin's first major hire, was let go. So was independent-film executive Sheroum Kim. The Hollywood Reporter says Belgrad oversaw more than 30 production executives and managed the Sony output arrangement that supplies Netflix films. He was also involved in the Ben Affleck-directed 'Animals.' TheWrap reports Bela Bajaria is out as content chief, with Peter Rice in, and says another reshuffle of the film unit is possible. Netflix opened 'La Bola Negra,' Spain's Oscar entry, in a small theatrical run this weekend.

LONDON — Sergei Loznitsa's 'Imperium' won best film in the Official Competition at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, which ends today. Screen International reports that Sompot Chidgasornpongse's '9 Temples To Heaven' won the Sutherland award for best first feature. It follows a man taking his ailing mother and nine relatives on a pilgrimage after his boss predicts she may die soon. A special mention went to Bertil Nilsson's 'Masc.' Asmahan Bkerat's 'Concrete Land,' about a mixed-race family fighting displacement and hostility in Jordan, took the Grierson award for documentary. Rahul Roye's 'Aman' won best short. Voting for the audience awards closes Wednesday, October 21. The AFI Fest in Los Angeles opens Thursday and runs to October 26, continuing the autumn festival run toward awards season.

LONDON — Gramophone announced its 2026 awards on October 7. The Piano category went to Bertrand Chamayou and Leif Ove Andsnes for a Schubert four-hands set, which the judges called an instant classic. Violinist Isabelle Faust was named Artist of the Year for a Ligeti concerto recording. Slipped Disc reported that Recording of the Year went to a 10-CD set of Louis Couperin's complete works, and mocked the slate as marginal. Shortlisted piano records from Yunchan Lim (Bach's Goldberg Variations, Decca) and Yuja Wang (Shostakovich concertos, DG) did not win their categories. In the magazine's awards issue, editors also praised Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's Beethoven Connection, Vol. 2, and Alexandre Tharaud's Mémoire. The October issue highlighted András Schiff's Brahms Klavierstücke for its varied colors.

LEEDS, England — Applications for the 2027 Leeds International Piano Competition close on October 31. Sir Stephen Hough is artistic director and jury chair for 2027. For the first time, competitors may play whatever music they choose. The upper age limit rises to 35, and first prize increases to £50,000. The organizers have also added a career-development fund for the gold medallist, an Encore Prize, and a prize for a community arts project to be delivered in 2028. The jury includes Piotr Anderszewski, Lucas Debargue, Janina Fialkowska, Alexander Gavrylyuk, Orli Shaham, Yeol Eum Son, Kathryn Stott and composer Errollyn Wallen. International first rounds run March 30 to April 6, 2027, in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Beijing and Seoul. The second round, semi-finals and concerto finals follow in Leeds in September 2027.

MEMPHIS — The Memphis Symphony Orchestra, in its 75th season, presents Verdi's Rigoletto in concert on Saturday, October 24, at 7:30 p.m. at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts. The performance is a collaboration with Opera Memphis. Music director Robert Moody conducts. Moody is in his 11th year with the orchestra. The orchestra and cast will perform the score in concert, without a staged production. The orchestra follows on October 30 with an Orchestra Unplugged program of Holst's The Planets at the Halloran Centre, with Moody as conductor and host. Last weekend it opened its Classic Accents series with Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem and The Lark Ascending, with concertmaster Barrie Cooper as soloist. Later this season, the orchestra plans a world premiere Requiem about U.S. forces in the Pacific from 1942 to 1975, and a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 program on January 30 and 31, 2027.