“Ralph Gomberg, the former principal oboist who held sway at the Boston Symphony while his brother Harold did the same, on the same instrument, at the New York Philharmonic, died on Saturday.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
The Suburbanization Of The Broadway Experience
“Now is as good a time as any to trot out the familiar lament — I mean observation — that Times Square, and the Broadway theater that is for good and ill geographically and thus atmospherically linked to it, has become a big old Big Apple-themed theme park that happens to be in New York.” And as Broadway’s neighborhood has changed, so has Broadway theatregoing.
Manatee Sex Talk, On Air And Online
After an on-air joke by Conan O’Brien, it was fear of the fine-wielding FCC that prompted NBC to buy the domain name “hornymanatee.com.” “By yesterday afternoon hornymanatee.com — created by Mr. O’Brien’s staff and featuring images of such supposedly forbidden acts as ‘Manatee-on-Manatee’ sex … — had received approximately 3 million hits, according to NBC.” And the site’s content is coming from both the show and its viewers. ” ‘We couldn’t have done this two years ago, three years ago,’ Mr. O’Brien said. ‘It’s sort of this weird comedy dialogue with the audience.’ “
Marketing Shows By SMS: Overstepping The Bounds?
Text messages from your favorite (or soon-to-be not-so-favorite) theatre company? Turns out that “marketing theatre by SMS has not only been going on for some time but is, in fact, a hotly contested issue which plummets us straight into all sorts of engagingly troublesome debates about public vs private and intrusion vs information in the digital age. There is no consensus whatsoever, it seems, on whether marketing by text is the new frontier of theatre ticket sales or a noxious further erasure of the boundaries of personal space.”
Why Conservative Architecture In Liberal Boston?
As Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art building was unveiled to the public, “What people were saying was that they couldn’t believe a building so audacious, so venturesome, could be built in — of all places — Boston. They were asking whether the ICA marked a watershed in the history of local architectural taste. Boston has been widely known, for a generation or more, as a conservative town architecturally, despite its liberal politics. To understand why, you have to know some history.” Robert Campbell explains.
Adapting Maugham, Again And Again
“If there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.”
Art Historian Robert Rosenblum, 79
“Robert Rosenblum, an influential and irreverent art historian and museum curator known for his research on subjects ranging from Picasso to images of dogs, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village.”
Getty Agrees To Return Funerary Wreath
“After nearly a year of negotiations, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has agreed in principle to return a rare fourth-century B.C. gold funerary wreath to Greece that cultural officials there contend was illegally removed from Greek soil, an expert briefed on the talks said today.”
Behind The Wheel, Pausing For Art
“Public art projects are usually intended to beautify. But artwork commissioned this summer by the city of Cambridge, Mass., has a more utilitarian goal: reducing traffic speeds at a busy intersection.”
When Spam Turns On The Literary Charm
“E-mail has long been blamed for reducing the quality of our communication to fragments filled with abbreviations and bad punctuation. But this year, in-boxes around the world took a turn toward the literary, thanks to a new breed of spam that pumps out passages from classics like ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘The Three Musketeers.’ “