Van Gogh

In the musical The Highest Yellow, the title is Vincent van Gogh's description of a color so intense that it is "where I know no fear,/where I disappear." Yet in this stunning musical - receiving its world premiere at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. - a young doctor is the character in greatest danger of losing himself, of disappearing. With an intricate score by Broadway composer Michael John LaChiusa and an incisive libretto by Washington playwright John Strand, the musical focuses primarily on Dr. Felix Rey, the intern assigned to treat van Gogh in the hospital in Arles, France, where the artist is admitted after cutting off his ear. The result is a show whose central theme is not the painter's artistic process; that theme was mastered in another musical about a post-Impressionist painter - Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George.

Title: "The Mythology of Vincent Van Gogh"Editor: Kodera TsukasaPublisher: John Benjamins PublishingLength, price: 461 pages (245 illustrations); $125Title: "Inventing Leonardo"Author: A. Richard TurnerPublisher: KnopfLength, price: 288 pages (69 illustrations); $27.50 In these increasingly relativistic -- excuse me, pluralistic -- times, individuals never "are" but "seem." Can anyone truly say what someone (or something) else "is," or is this description only an interpretation, colored by one's background, cultural context and historical assumptions?

Stuck on Van GoghHere's a new party game for the artistically inclined with a sense of humor: Pin the Ear on the Van Gogh is a 24-inch by inch full color poster of Van Gogh's "Self Portrait," sans his ear. A takeoff on pin the tail on the donkey, the goal of this game is to pin Van Gogh's ear in its proper place. A set of 12 self-adhesive ears is included. The game is available for $16.95 at Nouveau, 519 N. Charles St. (410) 962-8248. Would you like to be a scholar of great literature but can't be bothered to read all of those books?

Where: Maryland Institute College of Art's Falvey Hall at Brown Center, 1301 Mount Royal Ave. When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday Why: Hear Shades of Gray, MICA's a cappella group for free at the first a cappella-only event held by the institute. A cappella groups from the Johns Hopkins University (the Sirens) and Lehigh University (Melismatics) will also perform. The event celebrates the release of Shades of Gray's debut CD, Van Gogh's Missing Ear. Information: Call 410-225-2284 or visit www.mica.

VAN GOGH'S ROOM AT ARLES: THREE NOVELLAS. Stanley Elkin. Hyperion.312 pages. $22.95. The Muse, Stanley Elkin says, is real as digestion. "Indeed it is digestion. Of a sort. It's the metabolism of decision, conclusion, the brain's bum rush. . . ." Talent, he continues, is the ability to recognize what the Muse has given.The Muse has given Mr. Elkin, author of 16 works of fiction and essays, a love for the music of language. His stories build to a linguistic rhapsody. Characters and story line are merely vehicles for this rhapsody.

An art gallery that opened this month in Rome's Palazz Ruspoli, once a bank, is presenting an exhibition entitled "Expressionism: Masterpieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection from van Gogh to Klee."The exhibition, organized by the Memmo Foundation, part owner of the palace, contains 47 paintings representative of early 20th century movements preceding expressionism and associated with Van Gogh, Chagall, Kirchner, Kandinsky and Schiele.It is the first of three exhibitions planned within a year at the Palazzo Ruspoli Art Gallery, which includes a conference room, cafeteria and gift shop.

PARIS -- Dutch police arrested a known teenage extremist yesterday and six other suspects for allegedly plotting to assassinate Dutch politicians and to attack the headquarters of the Dutch intelligence service, authorities said. The group, they said, has links to a cell broken up last year after the Nov. 2 assassination of Theo van Gogh, an outspoken filmmaker and descendant of the artist Vincent van Gogh. As anti-terror agents carried out raids in Amsterdam, an outlying suburb and The Hague, well-armed police guarded the Netherlands' intelligence service headquarters, Parliament and other government buildings in The Hague.

PARIS -- A Dutch court convicted nine members of an Islamic extremist cell on terrorism charges yesterday, but the relatively light sentences and acquittals of five other suspects revealed continuing legal obstacles to fighting terrorism in the Netherlands. The verdicts in a heavily guarded courtroom in Amsterdam were a partial victory for prosecutors in the case against the Hofstad Group, which stunned the Netherlands when its leader assassinated filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in November 2004.

Taking the role of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective who solved "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," a Johns Hopkins medical school psychologist has focused her deductive powers on the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe's melancholy and madness.Her solution seems both elegant and obvious: the writer, she says, was probably manic-depressive. And, she says, illness probably inspired his croaking raven, razor-edged pendulum and other gloomy tales of death and mourning.Dr. Kay R. Jamison, speaking yesterday at a Hopkins symposium on mood disorders, argued that Poe is probably one of many writers and artists who have suffered from the ailment, which is marked by wild swings between frenzied, compulsive activity and crippling despair.

THE DUTCH held Theo van Gogh's funeral yesterday, his plain coffin decorated with a pack of French cigarettes and a bottle of white wine. On the spot where the provocative filmmaker died - where he was pulled off his bicycle and stabbed to death - mourners placed a cactus, a tribute to his prickly personality, but perhaps an emblem as well of a new mood in the Netherlands. Mr. Van Gogh mocked the intolerant strains in his country's Muslim community, and the suspect in his murder is a young Muslim from North Africa.