culture

Imagine opera singers accompanied by Klezmer musicians, a rock and roll band or Yo-Yo Ma. George Steel can. The artistic director and general manager of New York City Opera told unionized singers and musicians that he wants the flexibility to present nontraditional works, giving them less work. That demand contributed to a collapse in labor talks and a lockout of artists a month before the company's first 2012 performance.

Look who's sporting a big smile behind his mask on Broadway — none other than the once-mocked Spider-Man. The Broadway League reported Tuesday that "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" took in a whopping $2,941,790 over nine performances last week, which is the highest single-week gross of any show in Broadway history.

Seven decades after Nazi forces looted the National Museum in Warsaw during World War II, two paintings by treasured Polish artist Julian Falat were repatriated in a ceremony Thursday night, according to a statement from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Curators are making hard choices at the museum memorializing the September 11, 2001 attacks at the site of the World Trade Center's toppled twin towers, aiming to convey the horror of the event without trespassing into ghoulishness.

In a book due out Thursday, eminent scholars say it’s unlikely that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings‘ children, disputing a decade’s worth of conventional wisdom that the author of the Declaration of Independence sired offspring with one of his slaves.