“Part of me wonders whether musical theater featuring a call-to-action eliminates nuance — generally scarce in musicals as it is. Indeed, don’t theater makers fear our work being reduced to a message? Perhaps so, but I also don’t think that attempting to convince audiences that we should raise the age of criminal responsibility simplifies the audience’s journey. It’s the opposite — the audience experiences something like what our composers experienced: listening to a story, confronting and bypassing their own judgments about it, walking around with it, letting it spur them to make something from it. For our composers, that ‘something’ is a song. For the audience, collectively, it could be change.”
Tag: 03.07.17
Netflix Suggests Interactive Storylines – But Do Audiences Really Want This?
“It seems to me to misunderstand the fundamental appeal of television; that it is bedtime stories for grownups. You plonk yourself in front of the screen to be entertained. That doesn’t mean being fed pap; contemporary television is increasingly a feast for the upper reaches of the mind as well as the primitive bits that would be just as happy banging a stick on a stone. But it does mean being presented with a finished product: a complete, satisfying entity with a beginning, a middle and an end (however many seasons it takes to get there). We want to cede control to someone else.”
Kerry James Marshall Is On A(n Extremely Righteous) Mission
And that mission is to correct, as much as he can, the whitewash of art history in museums across the country. ““At a certain point, you have to decide whether you’d be satisfied always acknowledging the beauty and the greatness of what other people create or if you want to be in the same arena.”
Practice Does Not Actually Make Perfect – At Least, Not By Itself
Ulrich Boser reminds us of one of those factors that’s so obvious that people forget about it.
‘Netflix, This Is Not Chill’: Interactive Storylines Are A Bad Idea
Lucy Mangan: “It seems to me to misunderstand the fundamental appeal of television; that it is bedtime stories for grownups.”
Why Rosalind Is Shakespeare’s Most Complex Character
Angela Thirlwell: “Rosalind is a grand paradox. Man and woman, authentically alive yet forever a fiction, ageless and modern … When she sprints into the forest of Arden as the boy Ganymede, she expands our ideas about gender, and epitomizes what love feels like for both sexes, through the whole gamut of human emotions, in every time and place.”
Ending Weeks Of Disasters, Fresno Grand Opera Shuts Down
The California company, founded in 1998, had faced cash shortfalls, unpaid musicians, allegations of financial mismanagement, the firing of its music director, and a defamation lawsuit.
Former Fresno Grand Opera Directors Sue Company For Defamation
Ronald Eichman and Thi Nguyen, who were general director and associate director until the end of 2014, allege that the company and Matthew Buckman (Eichman’s successor) falsely accused Eichman and Nguyen of financial malfeasance and conflicts of interest in several stories published in The Fresno Bee last year. (The company itself promptly closed down.)
Looking At Oliver Sacks’s – Well, ‘Journals’ Isn’t Exactly The Right Word
The man wrote constantly, and he would do it on anything: notebooks, hotel pads, envelopes, menus, sheet music … Bill Hayes, Sacks’s widower, showed a bunch of his notes to Maria Popova, who transcribed some of the best ones.
Comic Sans Font Is Actually A Public Good, And Here’s Why
In response to the well-known quip that “Using Comic Sans is like turning up to a black-tie event in a clown costume,” Lauren Hudgins argues that “hating Comic Sans is ableist.” Drake Baer explains why.