THE AYALA Museum and Filipinas Heritage Library (FHL) — which have been closed for renovation since June of 2019 — will have a soft opening on Dec. 4, the Ayala Foundation has announced. Five spaces with new exhibits will be made accessible to the public.

SINGER Moira dela Torre and the nine-piece band Ben&Ben took home the night’s biggest awards at the 34th Awit Awards, streamed on the award’s official YouTube page on Nov. 29.

BROADWAY composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who helped American musical theater evolve beyond pure entertainment and reach new artistic heights with such works as West Side Story, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd, died early Friday at the age of 91, his publicist said.

LONDON —  Designers and celebrities paid tribute to Virgil Abloh at the Fashion Awards in London on Monday, where the late Louis Vuitton and Off-White creative force was honored as a leader of change within the industry.

MILAN —  Cher, Rita Ora, Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson and other music stars take center stage in the 2022 Pirelli calendar unveiled on Monday, shot by Canadian rocker and photographer Bryan Adams.

IT WASN’T big news earlier this month when Playboy Enterprises won a preliminary injunction against defendants who allegedly counterfeited its “Rabbitars”: the name the company has given to its nonfungible tokens (NFT), animated images of rabbits doing ... well, something. The case was an easy win. Nevertheless, the litigation raises a challenge we’ll soon have to deal with: how to treat unauthorized NFTs created not as competition for an existing brand, but simply as art.

THE ORTIGAS Foundation Library is inviting vendors of antiques, books, and ephemera to join its Christmas sale on Dec. 11 and 12 at the atrium of the Shoppesville mall, Greenhills Shopping Center, San Juan.

Lav Diaz’s Historya ni Ha (History of Ha) may be his strangest work yet. If in Ang Hupa (The Halt, 2019) he proposes a Filipino dystopia complete with dictatorship and pandemic and volcano-induced darkness, and in Panahon ng Halimaw (Season of the Devil, 2018) he presents the Philippines’ first-ever black-and-white, sung-through, no-instrument musical, this you might say is his Dead of Night – an astringently deadpan blackly comic film about a ventriloquist and his dummy. 

TWO romance stories and a musical series are among Chinese on-demand streaming service iQiyi’s first Filipino originals shows after sealing a content deal with ABS-CBN.

BETWEEN music, podcasts, gaming, and the unlimited supply of online content, most people spend hours a week wearing headphones. Perhaps you are considering a new pair for the holidays, but with so many options on the market, it can be hard to know what to choose.

TAIPEI — A documentary about pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong won a high-profile award at the Golden Horse Awards, the Chinese-speaking world’s version of the Oscars, in Taiwan on Saturday.

LOS ANGELES —  Disney has reclaimed its rightful place at the top of Thanksgiving box office charts. Encanto, the studio’s new animated musical fable, collected $40 million since Wednesday, a robust tally at a time when family audiences haven’t been eager to return to cinemas.