“A string of West End hit shows, including the Lion King, Wicked and James McAvoy’s sellout performance as Macbeth, could be hit by strikes after talks broke down between the Ambassador Theatre Group and the union representing front and backstage staff.”
Tag: 02.27.13
Margaret Atwood’s First Opera To Premiere Next Year
“Pauline, featuring an original score by Canadian composer Tobin Stokes and famed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s debut as librettist, will run for six to 10 performances in May at the refurbished 400-seat York Theatre [in Vancouver].”
Edwaard Liang To Lead Columbus’s BalletMet
“The incoming artistic director of BalletMet Columbus is Edwaard Liang, who’ll bring the experience of an outstanding international performing career and his choreographic talents to Ohio starting this July. The top post has been vacant since Gerard Charles, whose career with BalletMet spanned 26 years, 10 as director, left the company for a ballet master position with the Joffrey last summer. “
English National Ballet Needs Its New Rebranding (So Quit Fussing About It)
“Goodbye tutus and tights, hello dancing demons – Tamara Rojo now leads a company with a new look and feel, and the critics are wrong to complain.”
Dreaded Sequester Won’t Shutter Smithsonian’s Museums (Yet)
“The world’s largest museum complex is bracing for a $40 million cut in funding due to the budget stalemate in Congress, but the Smithsonian Institution is vowing to keep the doors open at its museums and the National Zoo.”
In Praise Of Concision
“Some guy on TV is describing how he fitted his automobile with a new skin: gluing them one by one, he has blanketed every inch of its exterior with beer-bottle caps. … Or he’s displaying the dozens of photo albums that catalogue, exhaustively, the individual stacks of pancakes on which he has breakfasted daily for the past six years. And as I sit watching, one of my daughters ambles by, glances at the screen, and mutters, ‘Whoa, free time’.”
Could Los Angeles Become Famous For Beautiful Bridges?
“As Los Angeles undertook massive freeway expansion in the latter half of the last century, aesthetics were sacrificed for efficiency when the car ascended as the primary mode of transportation. Yet there is a shift occurring in Los Angeles today, one indicative of a larger trend towards multi-modal transit with a renewed emphasis on beauty.”
Marie-Claire Alain, 86, Grande Dame Of Organists
“With over 260 recordings to her credit, she was arguably the most recorded organist and is only one of two people to have recorded the complete works of Bach three times … as well as the complete works of 12 other composers.”
Who Sets The Tone Of A Movie? The Music Supervisor
“The best music supervisors are sought for their combination of tastemaker, curator, producer, stickler for accuracy and verisimilitude, and they filter out a filmmaker’s worst tendencies.”
Offensive 19th Century Mural Gets Shown Again (But Only For An Hour At A Time)
“For the last decade or so, one of New York’s most curious and controversial pieces of public art has been hiding, Oz-like, behind a big green curtain.”