With Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen behind him, Maurice Sendak had nothing left to prove as a writer or illustrator. Then, around 1980, more or less simultaneously, he received invitations to create sets and costumes for two operas: Where the Wild Things Are, adapted from the book, and Mozart’s Masonic fairy tale, The Magic Flute. As to the first, who else in the world could have done it? As to the second, who could have done it better? READ ON

In an advertisement from the 1950s, a photograph shows a boy, around 10 years old, with his arm fully extended. Dangling from his little finger, without apparent effort, is a chair that has the tensile construction of a box kite. Its designer, the Milan-born polymath Gio Ponti, said he wanted to design a “chair-chair, devoid of adjectives.” Basing its silhouette on humble chairs produced by anonymous craftsmen, Ponti distilled his version to the point where it approached the rigor and precision of a letterform. READ ON

It was the mid-1990s, and Mariinsky Ballet virtuoso Sergei Vikharev was perplexed. Post-glasnost, he was now dancing the ballets of once demonized defectors Michel Fokine and George Balanchine—set by licensed repetiteurs from inviolate “texts.” But who was protecting his own theater’s classics—Swan Lake, La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty? READ ON