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‘La Cage aux Folles’ director Edouard Molinaro, who collaborated with Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, dead at 85 Edouard Molinaro, best known internationally for the late ’70s box office comedy hit La Cage aux Folles, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, died of lung failure on December 7, 2013, at a Paris hospital. Molinaro was 85. Born on May 31, 1928, in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, to a middle-class family, Molinaro began his six-decade-long film and television career in the mid-’40s, directing narrative and industrial shorts such as Evasion (1946), the Death parable Un monsieur très chic ("A Very Elegant Gentleman," 1948), and Le verbe en chair / The Word in the Flesh (1950), in which a poet realizes that greed is everywhere — including his own heart. At the time, Molinaro also worked as an assistant director, collaborating with, among others, Robert Vernay (the 1954 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Jean Marais) and...

Tony Award-nominee Robert Cuccioli Jekyll amp Hyde, Les Misrables will headline the December 18th at 3pm and December 30th at 9pm performances of Jacques Brel Returns...The Music of Brel, Blau, Shuman and Jouannest. Joining Cuccioli on December 18th will be Jim Stanek Lestat, Little Women, Forum, Arlo Hill Wheres Charley At Encores directed by John Doyle, Rick Hip-Flores who has performed in the pits of Billy Elliot, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and The Radio City Christmas Spectacular and Ereni Sevasti The Bacchae at The Public, Carnival at The Kennedy Center, and joining him on December 30th will be Rick Hip-Flores, Ereni Sevasti and Pj Baccari. Rick Hip-Flores will also serve as musical director for both performances.

Tony Award-nominee Robert Cuccioli Jekyll amp Hyde, Les Misrables and Helen Hayes Award-winner Natascia Diaz Broadway's Man of La Mancha, The Capeman, Seussical, Carousel will headline the November 30th at 7pm performance of Jacques Brel Returns...The Music of Brel, Blau, Shuman and Jouannest. Joining them in the cast will be Jim Stanek Lestat, Little Women, ...Forum, Rick Hip-Flores who has performed in the pits of Billy Elliot, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and The Radio City Christmas Spectacular and Ereni Sevasti The Bacchae at The Public, Carnival at The Kennedy Center. Rick Hip-Flores will also serve as musical director.

Tony Award-nominee Robert Cuccioli Jekyll amp Hyde, Les Misrables and Helen Hayes Award-winner Natascia Diaz Broadway's Man of La Mancha, The Capeman, Seussical, Carousel will headline the November 30th at 7pm performance of Jacques Brel Returns...The Music of Brel, Blau, Shuman and Jouannest. Joining them in the cast will be Jim Stanek Lestat, Little Women, ...Forum, Rick Hip-Flores who has performed in the pits of Billy Elliot, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and The Radio City Christmas Spectacular and Ereni Sevasti The Bacchae at The Public, Carnival at The Kennedy Center. Rick Hip-Flores will also serve as musical director.

Crime thrillers seem to require two things: an air of realism, and an expressive power. The balance can vary wildly. Marcel Carné's interesting, uneven Les assassins de l'ordre (1971) has a very good balance half the time, but the other half of the time it's neither realistic nor expressive.

Jacques Brel plays a crusading judge investigating a case of police brutality resulting in a death in custody, and... Wait. Jacques Brel, singer-songwriter and one of the ten famous Belgians? Is this possible? And if so, can somebody please immediately make a movie where Randy Newman plays a cop on the edge?

Still. Brel is ugly enough to be plausible as a judge, and his case is interesting. The dumb insolence of the cops he's investigating is also convincing and dramatic. Amusingly, one of them also plays a cop in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, which leads one to expect zany jokes that never come.

Off-Broadway producer Eric Blau has died of pneumonia after suffering a stroke. He was 87.

Blau, best known for his New York theatre tribute to late Belgian singer Jacques Brel, died in Manhattan on 17 February.

As creator and producer of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which opened in 1968, Blau compiled an evening's worth of the star's pop songs, translating his lyrics with composer Mort Shuman into English for American audiences.

The show ran for four years, and followed Blau's work as a poet, children's television producer, ghost writer and his post as founder and editor of Communist literary magazine, Masses and Mainstream.

Blau continued to create and produce Off-Broadway musicals after the success of the Brel production, although none matched the success of the tribute. He also went on to publish several books, including compilations of his poetry.

He is survived by his wife, Elly Stone, sons Matthew, John and Peter, four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.