On a warm Wednesday morning in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, as a throng of little girls and their mothers swells outside a Barbie-themed restaurant pop-up serving rainbow-sprinkle pancakes, another group has gathered in the service of very different IP.
Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells are inspecting the letterpress at Bowne & Co. Stationers, inside the South Street Seaport Museum, where resident printers still operate machines from the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Bowne & Co. itself dates back to 1775.) This month, more than a decade after starring in The Book of Mormon, the Tony-nominated actors return to Broadway in Gutenberg! The Musical!, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King. The show centers on Bud (Gad) and Doug (Rannells), two friends staging a frantic run-through of their musical about—you guessed it!—Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the movable-type printing press. A special kind of comic chaos ensues.
“Why don’t we do the show here?” Gad asks, poking around Bowne & Co.’s charming store front, where paper gifts and tote bags live alongside ancient printing paraphernalia. “We’d sell 10 tickets,” Rannells quips in response. “We’d be sold out!”
This story is from the October 2023 edition of Vogue US.
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This story is from the October 2023 edition of Vogue US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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Canvas the City - Martha Diamond captured the brisk energy of Manhattan.
How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”
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Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
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It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.
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If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It's no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient Egyptians used ground ochre to heighten their color; Queen Elizabeth I dabbed her cheeks with red dye and mercuric sulfide (which, combined with the vinegar and lead concoction she used to achieve her ivory pallor, is believed to have given her blood poisoning); flappers applied blush in dramatic circles to achieve a doll-like complexion, even adding it to their knees to draw attention to their shorter hemlines
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A trio of novels spirits you far away.
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A story of survival on a whaling ship sets sail on Broadway. Robert Sullivan meets the crew behind the rousing folk musical Swept Away.
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Harlem's National Black Theatre has been a storied arts institution in need of support. A soaring new home is shaping its future.
Simon Says
Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South-but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
