“With productions heading east to cheaper locations such as Hungary, the studio … has seen its earnings shrink. It is now pinning its hopes for income on an amusement park, hotel and spa being built on the site.”
Tag: 03.11.11
Smithsonian’s Controversial Show May Come to Brooklyn and Tacoma
“The controversial National Portrait Gallery exhibition ‘Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture’ … closed last month, but now the Brooklyn Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington State are collaborating to reconstitute it.”
How the Pet Shop Boys Wound Up Doing a Ballet Score
Royal Ballet star Ivan Putrov asked the Boys to write him a bit of music. Says Chris Lowe, “Ivan wasn’t anticipating what we came up with, I think he was just asking for some music to the Seven Veils, he got a bit more than that – a full three-act ballet with a narrative.”
Why Do So Many Cuban Dancers Defect To Canada?
“In fact, the exodus of dancers from the Cuban company is not new. Like other touring groups of Cuban performers, the ballet troupe bleeds dancers almost every time it travels abroad.”
Public Broadcasting Officials Fear Deep Cuts In Public Funding
“The cuts would be significantly deeper for small and rural stations, including nearly two dozen that get at least half of their revenue from federal money distributed by the Corp. for Public Broadcasting.”
Incendies, Canada’s Best Foreign Film Oscar Nominee, Wins Eight Genie Awards
“Denis Villeneuve’s searing drama Incendies inched ahead of Barney’s Version” – an adaptation of the Mordecai Richler novel – “to take the most Genies on Thursday night, earning eight awards, including best motion picture,” director, actress and adapted screenplay.
Kennedy Center Just Isn’t What It Could (And Ought To) Be
Philip Kennicott: “The Kennedy Center is physically isolated from the city of Washington by bad urban planning. It remains artistically isolated by a consistent lack of imagination about what a major urban arts center can do.”
Spider-Man Producers to Drop Many of Taymor’s Signature Touches
The producers who recently fired director Julie Taymor from the ever-more-expensive Broadway musical have so far decided on “scaling back the villainess Arachne, dropping the ‘Deeply Furious’ number of shoe-wearing spider-ladies, and reshaping the Geek Chorus of narrators.”
Stieg Larsson, Crusading Trotskyite Journalist
“Stieg was a political animal. He was a fervent advocate of women’s rights. He was an anti-fascist. Despite the runaway success of his thrillers, I have always considered his articles about Swedish and international rightwing extremism more interesting – and more important.”
‘The First Liberal’: Kwame Anthony Appiah on Montaigne
“Liberalism, at its core, is not so much a doctrine as a disposition, a habit of mind, and it’s compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge. These two currents run through Montaigne’s own sensibility, and to see how distinctive it was, it helps to recall [his place and] times” – 16th-century France, wracked by religious wars.