Category: today’s top story

“A student production of Assassins, the award-winning musical, was to have premiered Thursday night at Arkansas Tech University, but the administration banned it — and permitted a final dress rehearsal Wednesday night (so the cast could experience the play on which students have worked long hours) only on the condition that wooden stage guns were cut in half prior to the event and not used. Assassins is a musical in which the characters are the historic figures who have tried to kill a U.S. president.”

There is a long tradition of people working outside theatre buildings and producing theatre not based in a literary tradition. Whether it’s Art or not depends on whether it’s done well.

Conductor Lorin Maazel has penned an op-ed explaining why he believes it is important for his New York Philharmonic to play in Pyongyang next week. “It is a role of the highest possible order: bringing peoples and their cultures together on common ground, where the roots of peaceful interchange can imperceptibly but irrevocably take hold. If all goes well, the presence of the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang might gently influence the perception of our country there.”

“French curator Jérôme Sans is expected to be announced as the new artistic director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday.” It is believed that the move to replace founding director Fei Dawei came after Dawei had several clashes with colleagues at the center.

“It is one of the livelier paradoxes of the English-speaking theater today that its two most dazzling wordsmiths are incurably suspicious of the language they ply with such flair. No other living playwrights give (and, it would seem, receive) more pleasure from the sounds, shapes and textures of their lavishly stocked vocabularies. And none is more achingly conscious of the inadequacy of how they say what they say. This contradiction is not just an element of their style; it’s the essence of it.”

While many galleries have alarms, guards, and other staff to prevent off-hour thefts, they don’t always take precautions to avoid the most obvious scenario: armed criminals walking right through the front door.

The founder of Venezuela’s remarkably successful “El Sistema” music education program has won the $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize. “Dr. Jose Antonio Abreu took the triennial award in a unanimous decision. He is the first to win the prestigious prize without having had a major career as a performer or composer.”

Work by well-regarded Seattle artists appears uncomfortably similar to that of other artists. Idea plagiarism? “What’s wrong and what’s right in terms of originality and art is a matter of serious debate. If no one did anything wrong, then how can a work of art be tainted? Which is worse, theft or ignorance?”

Following a weeks-long flirtation, the outgoing director of the Bolshoi Ballet has decided not to join New York City Ballet as resident choreographer. Alexei Ratmansky “is considered one of the ballet world’s major dancemakers, and his presence would have been a coup for City Ballet.”

The Canadian government proposes to end a service that transports art beten museums across the country. Museums worry that traveling exhibitions will be dramatically curtailed.