Last Year’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Gives Us A Reading List

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won for “The Sympathizer,” says that “Sometimes people have said that I give voice to the voiceless Vietnamese. If you know anything about Vietnamese people, you know they are not voiceless. They are quite loud, whether it is in Vietnamese or English. Here is a reading list of some of the most important writing by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, just to prove that we have not been voiceless. Most of the time we are just not heard.”

Two More Dancers Leave Pennsylvania Ballet

Hired to run the ballet school after the previous staff member quit over the firings of a huge number of dancers, a married couple quits. “The couple, graduates of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy, had danced in Russia and the United States before opening a dance school, the Academy of International Ballet, in Media. Their son, Aleksey Babayev, is a Pennsylvania Ballet corps de ballet dancer.”

Limited-Run Musicals On Broadway: A New Business Model?

Limited-run plays have become standard on Broadway these days, but musicals tend to keep their runs open-ended for as long as the tourists keep coming. So it’s unusual that there are two limited-run musicals on Broadway right now (Sunset Boulevard and Sunday in the Park With George), following another (Falsettos) earlier in the season. Howard Sherman looks at why this phenomenon has developed and whether it can work financially.

Could A New Box Set Redeem 20th-Century Opera’s Grandest Flop?

Critics the world over flocked to New York in 1966 for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center – and they hated the piece composed for the occasion, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. The work’s reputation never recovered (and neither, in truth, did Barber himself). But after listening to a radio broadcast of the original production, recently released by the Met as part of a box set, David Patrick Stearns says that “Barber’s fall from grace is confounding” and that, 50 years on, Antony and Cleopatra deserves a reassessment.