The Tony-winning actor says, “What I liked about doing [Yasmina Reza’s A Spanish Play last year] is that no one walked out happy. The audiences weren’t happy, we weren’t happy, and it was a great learning experience.” And on his favorite playwright: “In Chekhov everybody is flawed. Everybody is a pain in the ass. Which is great. You read Chekhov’s biography, everyone makes everyone else sick.”
Tag: 02.01.09
Laid-Off Architect Tries Lemonade-Stand Approach
After being laid off twice in a year, John Morefield decided to set-up a booth at a Seattle farmers’ market, where he offers architectural advice for five cents. But “it’s not about the nickels in his tin can. It’s about meeting potential clients and contracts in a time when work is hard to come by.”
MOCA Detroit Gets Its First Full-Time Director
41-year-old Luis Croquer, the quadrilingual son of a Venezuelan diplomat who comes to Michigan from the Drawing Center in New York, is taking over a two-year-old museum with no permanent collection of its own. “It’s a great privilege to be handed an institution at such an early stage in its life where you’re able to create the program and set the tone for the future.”
About That Onstage Nudity: Must You Be So Literal?
“I once sat through a fringe Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which the multiple couplings had the entire audience staring at each other, at the ceiling, or indeed anywhere at all rather than the stage, to avoid seeing the naked couple jiggling on the floor just a few feet from our noses.” The reason wasn’t prudery as much as the fact “that simulated sex on stage is more often ludicrous or coy rather than genuinely erotic and tenderly intimate.”
As Budgets Are Cut, Culture Chiefs Aren’t Sacrificing
“City- and state-funded cultural institutions are cutting programs and slashing staff – even ‘firing’ the Bronx Zoo’s porcupine – and yet their CEO pay packages would make Wall Streeters blush.” That may be a bit hyperbolic (New York’s culture industry didn’t rake in $18.4 billion in bonuses last year, after all), but the perks for the head of one recently penny-pinching institution do include “an Upper East Side apartment and a full-time maid”….
Denver Arts Weathering Recession
“Things don’t look as bad in Denver as in some other parts of the United States. Planning and fundraising for the $33 million Clyfford Still Museum and $90 million overhaul of Boettcher Concert Hall are on schedule. Some local arts organizations have been forced to pare their budgets by as much as 12 percent, but virtually none has had to resort to layoffs or major cuts to programming.”
Italian Claims She Wrote Benjamin Button; Files Suit
“An Italian woman filed a lawsuit on Friday claiming the 13-time Oscar-nominated film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based on a short story she wrote in 1994 called ‘Il ritorno di Arthur all’innocenza’ (Arthur’s Return to Innocence).”
Needed: Cheaper Dance Classes
“Beginning Sunday and for at least the next three months, a new organization called Class is bringing some relief, offering a grass-roots network of innovative and inexpensive classes designed by and for a new generation of dance teachers and students.”
New Directions For Sydney Festival
Lindy Hume says “she is a supporter of large, family-friendly events but adds: ‘It’s also good for Sydney at the beginning of each year to have a good hard look at itself.’ She wants to emphasise the darker sides of the city and embrace the different elements of its “incredibly complex history”: the stories of settlers, indigenous people, convicts, immigrants. She says it is important for the festival to reflect the world in which it is presented.”
Poet Argues For Abolishing Laureate Job
Wendy Cope “said the role ‘blurred the distinction’ between worldly and artistic success. Good poetry could not be composed to order, she argued, adding that any poet could write about public events without holding an official title.”