Phil Chan, co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, has given advice to a number of companies on how to handle (in live performance) the ethnic-stereotype set pieces in the ballet’s second act. Here he offers three suggestions for providing access to the seasonal favorite for your community when the portrayals in your old production don’t look so good today. – Dance Magazine
Author: Matthew Westphal
Mysterious ‘Con Queen Of Hollywood’ (Who’s A Man) Arrested In England
Hargobind Tahilramani, a 41-year-old Indonesian man now in custody in Manchester, is believed to be the perpetrator of a years-long scam in which he impersonated major Hollywood executives such as Amy Pascal, Sherry Lansing, Kathleen Kennedy, and Wendi Deng Murdoch and swindled hopeful actors, stunt performers, makeup artists and others out of thousands of dollars each. – The Hollywood Reporter
The ‘Digital Magna Carta’: Section 230, The Law That Made Social Media And E-Commerce Possible
“Much of the modern internet exists thanks to a short section of a 1996 US law dedicated to moderating online porn.” That’s Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996: it protects websites with user-generated content — and that’s everything from Twitter and YouTube to Amazon and Wikipedia — from legal liability for that content. (It’s the creator that gets prosecuted or sued.) But Section 230 has been under attack from several sides, and the lawmakers that back them, for years — and the latest of those assaults is tied up with, yes, Donald Trump’s attempts to undo the outcome of the 2020 election. – Quartz
Plans For ‘The Black Version Of Lincoln Center’ On Chicago’s South Side
“[Actor Harry Lennix] intends to build both a two-theater complex to house (among others) the Congo Square Theatre Company and a new, nationally focused museum dedicated to Black contributions to the performing arts. Everything from dance to film to music to theater.” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)
Florence’s Soccer Stadium Is A Modernist Masterpiece But Badly Outdated. Preservationists And The Team Are At War.
The Artemio Franchi stadium, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1930, is regularly featured in architecture textbooks and is even on a page in Italy’s passport. But the seats are uncomfortable, some of them are exposed to rain, and there’s no place for revenue-generating shops or eateries. The team’s owner, with the fans on his side, wants to tear it down and build a new one; preservationists are aghast; the culture ministry in Rome will be the referee. – The New York Times
A COVID-Safe Drive-In Theatre For Stage Plays Will Open Next Spring
The DriveINSIDE theatre, which is approved for operating even under Britain’s Tier 3 pandemic restrictions, will have a four-week run in Manchester in March before touring the rest of the UK. Cars will be directed to a designated parking spot, the equivalent of an assigned seat, and passenger-viewers will be able to sit outside on the driver’s side. – Manchester Evening News
How COVID Turned One Of The Year’s Hottest Plays Into A Site-Specific Work
After the pandemic blew up the plans of every American stage company for this year, Blanka Zizka, director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, got the idea to create a COVID bubble for cast and crew at a house in the Poconos, where they’d do a site-specific production for later viewing online. And one of the year’s most awarded scripts, Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, seemed like the perfect choice. Writer Jane M. Von Bergen reports on how Zizka and her colleagues made it happen, complete with actual screaming foxes. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Camilla Wicks: Towering talent found, lost, and found again
The clear, slipped voice at the other end of the phone was neither astonished nor impressed to learn that her recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto was a collector’s item whose original LP was then selling for $125. “It’s not that good,” she said, sounding mildly exasperated. Oh, but it is. – David Patrick Stearns
The Rediscovery (At Last) Of Ethel Smyth
“In 1934, all of musical England gathered to celebrate the 75th birthday of one the country’s most famous composers – Dame Ethel Smyth. During a festival spanning several months, audiences crowded into the Queen’s Hall, London, to hear her symphonic cantata The Prison, or settled in at home to listen to the BBC broadcasts of her work. At the festival’s final concert in the Royal Albert Hall, the composer sat beside Queen Mary to watch Sir Thomas Beecham conduct her Mass.” Yet within a couple of decades she was all but forgotten — until just the past few years. – The Guardian
Muslims Have Been Visually Depicting The Prophet Muhammad For Centuries
Certainly, images of the Prophet of Islam have been far, far less common than those of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and other Christian figures, and Muslim culture, especially in the Arab world, has tended to disapprove of pictures of any human or animal. Yet miniatures and manuscript illuminations featuring Muhammad did start appearing in the late Middle Ages in the Persianate world, and a calligraphic equivalent in Arabic was developed as well. – The Conversation