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Directors at the Ali Forney Center had reason to thank Bea Arthur for being a friend today after receiving a $300,000 gift from the estate of the late actress (and Golden Girl).

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Nowadays Times columnist Frank Rich is usually explaining Obama's agenda to the masses or championing this civil rights cause or some other issue. But first he was known for his theater criticism in the Times. This week he'll be interviewing Sondheim out in Seattle, so The Stranger's editor, Dan Savage, decided to interview Rich. He doesn't mince words—calling Washington D.C. much more unsophisticated than Seattle (or Chicago)—and sharing his opinions about theater. But Savage also asks Rich why he spends so much time and ink on gay issues:

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Some of you might best know Adam Shankman as the director of Hairspray—that one where John Travolta does drag in a fat suit—but I prefer to think of him fondly as the judge most likely to burst into tears on So You Think You Can Dance. Where he registers on your pop culture radar is really neither here nor there. What's important is Shankman announced today his decision to put down the tissues and get back into the director's chair; he's been picked to take musical Rock of Ages from Broadway to the big screen.

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Sure, the New York Times might be getting rid of 100 newsroom jobs, but that doesn't mean that there's no good news coming from the paper these days.

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One burial wasn’t enough for Edgar Allan Poe or his fixation with macabre and morbidity. In fact neither was two. On Sunday, Poe was buried for the third time in celebration of what would have been his 200th birthday.

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More than 20 years after its Broadway debut, the Phantom of the Opera is making a return to his creepy, half-masked stalking ways in Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-awaited sequel 'Love Never Dies,' and what better way to pay homage to the longest running show on Broadway than by trying to recreate the magic of the Phantom's haunting of the classic, iconic Paris Opera House all over again at...the fairgrounds of Coney Island?

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Romanian-born writer Herta Muller has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. The author of The Appointment and The Land of Green Plums will take home a cool $1.4 million and big-time bragging rights. Bully for her.

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Ryan Adams definitely didn’t go to school for marketing—or music or art for that matter. And based on the window display he created for his latest art exhibit, he should have left the advertising to the professionals or at least a fifth-grader with more finger painting finesse.

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