Actors' Equity Names West Side Story Cast Members Outstanding Broadway Chorus

The Milwaukee Symphony opens new season with Bernstein's Symphony No. 1 ("Jeremiah") on September 26, 2009.

West Side Story film to Be Shown at NYC's Lincoln Center followed by a Q&A with original cast member Eliot Feld

West Side Story’s John Arthur Greene Joins Broadway Classroom Workshop

Broadway.com’s sister organization Broadway Classroom has scheduled a new workshop featuring West Side Story star John Arthur Greene (Riff) and taught by actor/choreographers Melissa Rae Mahon and Sean McKnight. The first session in a new series titled “Putting It All Together” will be held on September 26 at a rehearsal studio to be announced.

Chita Rivera among Medal of Freedom honorees

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter of "On the Waterfront", Dies at 95

John Arthur Greene Takes Over as Riff in Broadway's West Side Story

On Saturday July 19^th the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival presented the 10000 Euro Leonard Bernstein Award to cellist Leonard Eischenbroich.

The award is given to a young artist at the beginning of their career to enable them to pursue performing. He has performed with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in the Philharmonia of St. Petersburg, the Brandenburg State Symphony in the Nioklaisaal in Potsdam, the Kremerata Baltica at the Lockenhaus Festival, the Bremen Philharmonic in the Bremer Glocke, the Stavanger Symphony, the Belarus National Philharmonic in the Concertgebouw, among others. Mr. Elschenbroich was awarded the Leonard Bernstein Award at the 6000 seat Spakassen-Arena in Kiel, where he performed the Brahms Double Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Christoph Eschenbach as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. He has just made his Debut recording to be released this year. Born 1985 in Frankfurt, Leonard was invited to the Yehudi Menuhin School in London at the age of 10. He finished his degree at the Music College of Cologne with Frans Helmerson. He held a Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music in London and is currently a fellow at the Trinity College of Music in London.

Concertgebouw Bruges announces their FOCUS: BERNSTEIN program. A series of concerts focusing on the many facets of Bernstein's music.

Find out more at http://www.concertgebouw.be/reeks_detail.php?rid=87

The Broadway revival of West Side Story, currently at the Palace Theater, will hold a special benefit performance for The Actor's Fund on Sunday, July 19 at 8pm.

The show, which features music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, transports Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the turbulent streets of the Upper West Side in 1950's New York City as two star-crossed lovers, Tony and Maria, find themselves caught between the rival street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds, the "Jets" and the "Sharks."

The revival, directed by the musical's librettist Arthur Laurents, was nominated for four 2009 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical, and won for Featured Actress, Karen Olivo.

For benefit tickets or more information, call 212-221-7300 ext. 133 or visit www.actorsfund.org/performances/current/westsidestory.

Concord Music Group has released a double CD-set of the legendary Tony Bennett/Bill Evans recordings originally made in 1975 and 1976. The set includes the Bernstein songs "Some Other Time" and "Lucky To Be Me" and also features never before released alternate takes of these and other songs.

University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) Chancellor John Mauceri has announced that James Baron Fenwick III of Todd is the first recipient of The Leonard Bernstein Excellence Award.

The award was created by Mauceri with a gift from Leonard Bernstein’s three children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, and matched by The William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust.

For the first time, the symphony «Kaddish» composed by the famous American composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), has been played in Yad Vashem, the Shoa Memorial in Jerusalem. Produced in 1963 in Tel Aviv, this work which proposes an iconoclast version of the «Kaddish», the prayer of the dead in Judaism, yet takes root in the Jewish tradition. A duality respected in the text of Samuel Pisar, survivor of Auschwitz, which is an integral part of the last version of this symphonic work.

The Tanglewood Music Center has announced the recipients of the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship and the Felicia Montealegre Bernstein Fellowship. Congratulations to David Hughes, Jung Sun Kang and Elena Doubovitskaya.

This Fourth of July, thrill to Leonard Bernstein's recording of John Philip Sousa's greatest patriotic marches, including the world-renowned Stars and Stripes forever! And experience Bernstein at his most eloquent -- his "Songfest" -- composed to honor the bicentennial birthday of American independence. It includes settings of 12 poems, all by great American poets, from Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes, from Edgar Allan Poe to Frank O'Hara.

Obersvations on "West Side Story" from Julie Nagel, Ph. D.

"I recently went the West Side Story revival. I feel changed by the experience. I don¹t think I can really put it in words. I felt something the minute we saw the marquee on Broadway.....excitement, yes, but more.....and when we walked into the theater I could only try to imagine what Bernstein and the other collaborators felt when they attended the premier.

The Play/Opera/Show ­ I don¹t know what to call it, is so familiar to me that I didn¹t know what to expect...also I've been analyzing it all year and presenting it all year, so I didn¹t know if I¹d get intellectual watching. No way! I was mesmerized from opening to close, and yes, I needed more kleenex than I brought ­ The bright red curtain was breathtaking as I sat waiting for I'm not quite sure what....except I was there.....It was real, and unreal. The opening tritone blast drew me in not as a researcher or psychoanalyst. I was caught up in the Sharks and Jets, and by extension myself, the entire 2 hours 40 minutes.

WSS is timeless and timely. It is magnificent. The themes made more poignant through the genius music - so many of them speak to us today, yesterday, and tomorrow .It is breathtaking . The Spanish seemed natural to me and not just beccause I know all the words by heart - I think anyone would "get it".

The dancing was unbelievable. How can anyone do those things? I would go again.....and again."

Julie Jaffee Nagel, Ph.D. is a graduate of The Juilliard School (Piano) , The University of Michigan (MA psychology, MSW, Ph.D. psychology and social work) , and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, where she is on the faculty. She is Chair of the ApsaA Discussion Group, “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Music” and Co-Chair of the ApsaA Committee, “Psychoanalysis and the Arts”. Winner of the Nathan Segel Award (2003 - paper on Mozart, 2007 paper on Lucia di Lammermoor) and Karl A. Menninger Award (2008 paper on Lucia di Lammermoor), she has published and presented to a variety of groups on her work on performance anxiety and music as a point of entry into emotion. In January 2009 Dr. Nagel presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association national meetings in New York on "West Side Story" with Jamie Bernstein as invited featured speaker. Dr. Nagel also presented her work on West Side Story at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Center, April 2009. Julie Jaffee Nagel is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In Memoriam: Julia Vega

February 25, 1918 – June 7, 2009

Julia Vega, legendary nanny and housekeeper for the family of Leonard Bernstein, died on June 7 of complications from stomach surgery. She was 91 years old. Up to the day of her surgery, Ms. Vega was the active housekeeper at the apartment jointly owned by the Bernstein family. Although long entitled to retirement, Ms. Vega chose to continue her myriad activities, including her sought-after cooking, her sewing and laundering, her care of birds and her prodigious horticulture.

Raised on a farm in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, Ms. Vega came to work for the Bernstein family in 1954, when the eldest Bernstein child, Jamie, was just 2. Alexander was born the following year, and Nina was born in 1962. Ms. Vega helped raise all three Bernstein children, filling in both as nanny and housekeeper when the Bernstein parents were abroad. She acquired excellent English speaking and reading skills, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen, a proud voter and an avid follower of national politics.

After the death of Felicia Montealegre Bernstein in 1978, Ms. Vega became Mr. Bernstein's live-in housekeeper at his apartment in the famous Dakota building on the Upper West Side. After Mr. Bernstein died in 1990, the Bernstein children sold the Dakota apartment and acquired a smaller apartment in the Parc Vendome building on West 56th Street. In this new apartment, Ms. Vega took on the role of elder-in-chief of the Bernstein family. Alexander Bernstein had his office there, and various friends and family members dropped by daily. Ms. Vega unfailingly supplied refreshments for board meetings, music rehearsals and all manner of activities at the apartment. Her friends traversed all walks of society, from the building doormen to Peter Jennings. Her coffee was equally strong for one and all, but only the inner circle was permitted to sample her celebrated empanadas.

Ms. Vega was renowned for her discretion. Had she chosen, she could have written the ultimate tell-all about the myriad luminaries who came through the Bernstein household over the years: everyone from Mrs. John F. Kennedy and her children, to the actor Richard Burton and his wife Elizabeth Taylor, to the Bernsteins' Dakota neighbor Rudolf Nureyev. She was a fierce defender of familial privacy in a world of persistent public scrutiny.

Ms. Vega transcended the definitions of family service, becoming a family member herself and ultimately the beacon of that family. "She was loyal beyond telling," wrote family friend Mike Nichols of Ms. Vega.

Funeral services will be held on Thursday morning, June 11, at 10 a.m. at the Church of St. Francis de Sales in Manhattan.

Behind-the-Scenes Video of the West Side Story recording session

Follow the Amazon.com link to see exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the new West Side Story cast recording sessions!

Order your copy of Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician by Barry Seldes today!

"Finally, a biography of Bernstein that does not merely chronicle of his career but truly explains it. Barry Seldes argues most convincingly that Bernstein's life in music is bound up with his political perspective, and his creative commitments reflected his social ones. What emerges from this meticulously researched, engagingly written, and utterly fascinating account is a richer, truer portrait of an important American composer, conductor, and citizen."--Elizabeth Bergman, author of Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War "