Divamensch

This week's diva/mensch pair is a bit of a stretch in terms of the overall theme, it has only a glancing relation to the Tony Awards, but it's one of my favorite diva/mensch pairs ever. So please indulge me. One of the Best Play nominees was John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (the winner that year was Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers). The husband in the play is a Manhattan art dealer and in one scene he shows his guests a two-sided Kandinsky painting, "Chaos/Control." Diva:

Stephanie and I saw Verdi's *Macbeth* at the Met on Sept 29 2026. This was my fifth time seeing the opera, I had no idea I liked it so much! The only other operas I've seen so often are *Salome* (six times) and *Tristan und Isolde* (five times). The difference with *Macbeth* is that there are new things in the score I notice each time. That's very rewarding. This time it was a moment in the orchestra. The men in the chorus are getting ready to kill Banquo and the music is goi