Whitney Cummings, co-showrunner of the revived sitcom, wanted to break beyond the liberal media bubble: “Since tweeting wasn’t working, maybe giving my brain to a show that touched the hearts and got the eyeballs of so many working-class people is how I could finally do my part to help us all make sense of the election. … This show is not about Trump – it’s about the circumstances that made people think Trump was a good idea.”
Tag: 01.16.18
Should Different Theatres Have Distinct Artistic Identities?
Matt Trueman: “There have been times, over the last decade, where London’s major theatres have felt rather interchangeable. Plenty of shows could have been scooped up from one programme and set down in another without seeming at all out of place. … Artistic identity, like any identity, isn’t a concrete thing. It’s amorphous and indistinct; fluid, not fixed … a complex amalgamation of a number of things – history, aesthetics, even audience. It’s more easily intuited than definitely expressed. It can be changed and betrayed, diminished and lost.”
It’s The Largest Gift Ever Given To A Philosophy Department: $75 Million
“Bill Miller, the value investor who famously beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for 15 consecutive years (and whose faith in bank stocks later won a mocking depiction in the movie The Big Short), has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University.”
Joe Frank, Unique Public Radio Monologuist, Dead At 79
He began his career in free-form radio at WBAI, New York City’s Pacifica affiliate, and – after a brief, unlikely stint as host of NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered – spent decades at Southern California’s KCRW. Ira Glass was once one of his production assistants; he and host Madeleine Brand remember Frank in this audio segment from Press Play.
Misty Copeland And Her Mentor, A Pioneering Black Ballerina Of The 1950s
“[Raven] Wilkinson, now 82, risked death and arrest by touring with the [Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo] in the South during a period when it was illegal for black and white dancers to share a stage. Though circumstances have changed in the years since then, the saga of what she went through is still relevant to today’s dancers, says Copeland.”
Bayeux Tapestry To Be Displayed In Britain For First Time In 950 Years
The 229-foot-long work of embroidered linen, which depicts the Norman Conquest of England and is thought to date from a few years after it, will be lent by France to the UK five years from now, once tests have confirmed that it isn’t too fragile to be transported.
New Vincent Van Gogh Drawing Discovered, Another Authenticated
“The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry was acquired in 2014 by the Van Vlissingen Art Foundation, which then showed the work to specialists at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. After research into the subject, style, technique, materials and provenance, they concluded that it is indeed by the artist. … What adds to the importance of the discovery is that the Van Gogh Museum is now accepting a similar work in its own collection that it had rejected a few years ago.”
Surprise Ending Of ‘Carmen’ Starts Debate About PC And #MeToo In Italy
At the end of a new production of the Bizet opera at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence, instead of being knifed by Don José, Carmen steals his gun and shoots him. By German standards of Regieoper this is very minor, but “afterwards theatrical purists, media pundits and conservative politicians derided the change as an example of political correctness going too far. … With a general election due in Italy in early March, this debate quickly moved to the political stage.”
‘Bra Willie’, South African Poet And Activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, Dead At 79
“[He] first received acclaim while living in the United States in the 1960s. When he returned to South Africa after the fall of apartheid in the early ’90s, he was welcomed as a national hero. In 2006, he became the second person to be named the country’s poet laureate. His poetry addressed themes of black solidarity, displacement and anticolonialism with an uncompromising directness.”
Russia’s Leading Avant-Garde Theatre Director Sees House Arrest Extended Again
“[Kirill] Serebrennikov was charged in August 2017 with embezzling state funds at Moscow’s famous Gogol Center theater, in a case seen in the Russian artistic community as politically charged.” His house arrest, already extended once last October, was due to expire on Jan. 19. He has spoken out about Russian actions in Ukraine and Crimea, and he was the stage director of the controversial ballet about Rudolf Nureyev that premiered at the Bolshoi late last year.