STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE COLUMNS

Mike Fressola writes about entertainment for the Staten Island Advance

• In great company on 'The Black List'
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE -- The austere, large-format portraits of high achievers in "The Black List" at the Brooklyn Museum this fall are pretty discrete. They're cool, attractive and only moderately informative.

• Looking to the East for holiday music
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Richmond Choral Society would hate to see attendance fall off at the performances of fellow metro-area ensembles.

• A couple-three dirtballs sitting around talking
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Seeing the "American Buffalo" revival is like getting clocked upside the head with a steam iron. Except that it feels great.

• Art Lab looks at how artists teach, learn
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- "Why Printmaking?," an unusually large (120-piece) show at the Art Lab, is a kind of final exam for students of the late artist/printmaker Herman Zaage.

• In great company on 'The Black List'
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE -- The austere, large-format portraits of high achievers in "The Black List" at the Brooklyn Museum this fall are pretty discrete. They're cool, attractive and only moderately informative.

• Playing the Everyman of 'Catch-22'
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Actor John Lavelle hasn't been so jazzed since his Broadway debut as the muddled young bachelor from "The Graduate" in 2002.

• The garden's even better once the leaves fall
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When fall deepens, even the most loyal garden-goers find other ways to get their flower-and-foliage fix.

• 500 years of New York, hand drawn
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Metropolitan Museum wasn't even a gleam in its founders' eyes when the far older New-York Historical Society was created in 1804.

• More music from singer who left too soon
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Any new recordings of the late singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson will bring pleasure and sadness.

• A debut, plus a million-dollar fiddle
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Consider the options open to concert-goers in the metropolitan area. Almost any night, accomplished musicians, companies and ensembles -- local and international -- grace stages and halls all over the city.

• The prince and the painter
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Painter Sarah Yuster's largest and most complicated painting, a 9-by-12-foot triptych, recently left her West Brighton studio bound for Bangkok.