Can A Theater Function With Four Artistic Directors? Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater Will Try It

Blanka Zizka, who founded the company with her ex-husband Jiri about 40 years ago and has been sole artistic director since a couple of years before his death in 2012, “has recruited three new co-artistic directors — noteworthy local playwright/director James Ijames, Russian-born director Yury Urnov (who’s had a long association with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington), and Morgan Green of the New Saloon theater in Brooklyn — to share the AD responsibilities with her starting this summer.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Actress Zoe Caldwell, Four-Time Tony Winner, Dead At 86

She began her professional career in her native Melbourne at age 9, went to England and joined the RSC at 26, and was a founding member of Tyrone Guthrie’s theatre company in Minneapolis. Though she appeared occasionally in TV and film, she was most famous for her stage performances. She won Tonys for playing Miss Jean Brodie, Medea, Maria Callas (in Master Class), and (her first) for a double-bill of Tennessee Williams one-acts that ran for a week. – The New York Times

Arts Council England Warns Organisations: Get More Diverse Or Give Up Government Funding

“Arts organisations and museums in England are being warned they will lose public funding unless they meet ‘stretching’ targets to create and attract more diverse workforces and audiences. … ACE has been publishing diversity data for five years but has often been accused of merely talking instead of taking strong action. The language this year is significantly more robust.” – The Guardian

‘True Grit’ Author Charles Portis Dead At 86

“[He] was a master of shaggy-dog stories set on the American frontier or just beyond the Southern border, where his characters journeyed to recoup a debt, mete out justice or track down a runaway spouse. … By 1998, when author and journalist Ron Rosenbaum called him ‘our least-known great novelist,’ four of his five books were out of print.” – The Washington Post

Art Critic Christopher Knight Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

It’s the second Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation award and comes with a $50,000 prize. Knight has been an art critic at The Times since 1989, where he continues to chronicle the growth of Southern California’s visual art scene. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1991, 2001 and 2007, and he received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for art and design criticism last year. – Los Angeles Times

How Musicians Are Starting To Grapple With The Climate Impact Of Touring

“It seems to me that the only solution commensurate with the scale of the problem is fundamentally changing the way musicians work. We have to stop seeing it as reasonable that we’d play in Barcelona one day, London the next, and New York two days later. And stop seeing it as reasonable that, at a big festival in Barcelona, fifty thousand out of the hundred thousand people there have flown from the U.K. to attend.” – The New Yorker