“The Mountaintop,” a new two-character play that imagines a surprising turn of events for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his assassination, is aiming for Broadway in the fall, the producers Jean Doumanian and Sonia Friedman announced Wednesday.

The play, by Katori Hall, received a critically praised production in London last summer, and the producers said in a statement that they were eager to capitalize on its success by moving swiftly ahead with a Broadway production.

They said they were in negotiations with Kenny Leon to direct; Mr. Leon is directing the forthcoming revival of August Wilson’s “Fences” on Broadway....

Visitors of the National Gallery of Canada will be able to browse and appreciate rare historical art books that are too fragile to touch, as a result of a new collaboration between the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and HP Canada (HP). Thanks to interactive HP TouchSmart technology, viewers will be able to “flip through” electronic versions of the books on a widescreen display with a multi-touch enabled screen, while the original works remain safely protected in a display case. The NGC is the first major cultural institution in Canada to partner with HP to make art more accessible through interactive displays.

The first works to receive this special treatment are two bound albums of photographs that are part of the upcoming exhibition 19th-Century French Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada, on view from February 5 to May 16, 2010. The albums, Félix Bonfils’s Souvenirs d’Orient, Album pittoresque des sites, villes et ruines de la Terre-Sainte, 1878, and...

Eva Longoria and Yo-Yo Ma have a common ancestor.

It takes a long time and considerable patience to get to that surprise denouement of “Faces of America,” a four-part PBS series, beginning on Wednesday, about family roots by the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. And even with charming celebrities — Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan are among the 12 whose genealogy is explored almost back to Paleolithic times — the telling can at times be a little wearisome....

Mr. Gates, the film’s narrator and writer, put a huge effort into this project, which is obviously dear to his heart. The director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, Mr. Gates is a founder of the genealogy Web site AfricanDNA.com, and the editor in chief of The Root (theroot.com), a site on African-American news, culture and genealogy. He has also done two previous series about African-American genealogy for PBS....

...

[Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is writing a book for Bloomsbury on fiction and British politics from An Ideal Husband to In the Loop. He is also a member of the History & Policy Network.]

If journalism is the first draft of history the biopic is now a close second, having become the staple output of many television drama departments. Recently figures as diverse as the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and Winnie Mandela have been given the treatment.

Historians undoubtedly ground their teeth as these accounts gave the protagonist undue importance and distorted events for dramatic effect. For their mantra has long been that history is made through the interaction of structure and agency, a process in which the individual, however famous, plays but a part. However recent US research [Andrew Butler et al, 'Using popular...

A new installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997), demonstrates how Chinese artists learned, historically, from earlier masterpieces and from nature. It showcases more than 100 works—including paintings, sketches, drawings, calligraphies, and poetry manuscripts—by Xie Zhiliu (pronounced "shay jer leo"), one of modern China's leading artists and connoisseurs. It also marks the 100-year anniversary of his birth. A number of his sketches and copies will be accompanied by photographs of earlier works that inspired him and by his own completed works, in order to trace how he developed his unique style. Drawn primarily from a recent gift to the Metropolitan Museum from the artist's daughter Sarah Shay, the works on view comprise the first solo exhibition of Xie Zhiliu's works to be organized outside China.

"The field of Chinese painting is singularly lacking in examples of how traditional artists...

[Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY.]

Tonight, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the...

One hundred years after the death of the French artist Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to this pioneer of modernism. Forty outstanding works provide a concise overview of the development and diversity of his oeuvre. A customs official, Rousseau had no formal art training and initially painted in his free time. Many years passed before his art, non-academic and long considered merely naive, found recognition in the Paris salons. In addition to the legendary jungle pictures characteristic of his late work, Rousseau also painted views of Paris and environs, as well as figures, portraits, allegories and genre scenes. With Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin, Rousseau was one of the artists whose visual inventions paved the way for incipient modernism. After the great Impressionists and their direct heirs had developed a new view of the visual world, Rousseau tapped sources beyond the academic tradition for modern artists to come. Never having...

Three of this year's Oscar best picture nominees have something unusual in common -- they have leading characters who are open, self-proclaimed Jews.

Think about it: It's almost impossible to find any goyim in the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," a slyly satiric look at the Jewish community in a 1967-era Midwestern town. A big chunk of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" revolves around a raucous band of Nazi-scalping Jewish soldiers who've been assembled to go after the Fuhrer and his high command. And Lone Scherfig's "An Education," costars Peter Sarsgaard as an unscrupulous young Jewish real-estate speculator who woos a 16-year-old British schoolgirl eager to see the world.

An-education You'd think this might be cause for celebration, or at least a show in pride, in the Jewish community, especially since you can often go years at a time without seeing openly Jewish characters in Hollywood films. But are Jews happy? As my...