Shocking As It Is to Believe, the Theater May Be in a New Golden Age
Audra McDonald, Broadway’s greatest voice, is back. A fascinating profile of a gifted, ground-breaking, Broadway perfectionist.
What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?
[Not single-page] Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits that predisposed a long and healthy life? (He smoked for years.) Is there something about his attitude? (He thinks maybe.) Is there something about his genes? (He thinks not.) And here he cuts me off. He’s not interested in his longevity.
But scientists are. A boom in centenarians is just around the demographic bend; the National Institute on Aging predicts that their number will grow from the 37,000 counted in 1990 to as many as 4.2 million by 2050. Pharmaceutical companies and the National Institutes of Health are throwing money into longevity research. Major medical centers have built programs to satisfy the demand for data and, eventually, drugs. Irving himself agreed to have his blood taken and answer questions for the granddaddy of these studies, the Longevity Genes Project at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, which seeks to determine whether people who live healthily into their tenth or eleventh decade have something in common—and if so, whether it can be made available to everyone else.
A Web and a Prayer
Profile of Julie Taymor and the $70 million “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Much has transpired in the eight and a half years since Tony Adams, the original producer, having struck what some insiders say was a crippling deal with Marvel for the stage rights for Spider-Man, approached Bono and the Edge, of the rock group U2, about writing the songs. They in turn approached Taymor, then finishing her movie “Frida,” to direct. (“We were only going to do it if we could do it with Julie,” says Bono, who had loved Taymor’s “The Lion King.”) After reading through the original comic books and realizing that they offered “a mythology as authentic as any other,” she agreed. “Every age has its own myth that becomes more potent than others,” she says. “And this is ours.”
The Leap
[Not single-page] Next week, Teddy Graubard would have graduated from Dalton — a brilliant teenager, with a mild form of Asperger’s, whose path seemed almost limitless. So what led him to the window?