Tag: 03.19.19

An Argument Against Colorblind Casting

Playwright Chisa Hutchinson got involved with theatre because of a “badass” theatre teacher who let her write her own monologues for acting class, because outside of A Raisin in the Sun there just wasn’t much available for her to perform. This same teacher brought her to see August Wilson debate Robert Brustein at Town Hall in Manhattan. She found herself gravitating to Wilson’s point of view that colorblind casting is lazy and can erase the experiences of different races of people. – American Theatre

New Thinking On Getting Old

As the population surges into young old age and old old age, the number of books wrestling with that question has grown from a trickle to a tsunami. Apart from the science journals and science-fiction novels debating whether is it possible or desirable to prolong the lifespan by fifty or a hundred years, or (might as well go for it) eternally, books designed to help readers navigate the treacheries of ageing fall roughly into three categories: the scientific, the personal and the political. – Times Literary Supplement

In A Country With Few Public Libraries, Ordinary Citizens Create Their Own

There’s the tuk-tuk bookmobile toodling around Jakarta schools. “There is the Perahu Pustaka, a library boat that sails around West Sulawesi. There are libraries on the back of vegetable carts, shelves lugged around by horses in Serang and in West Papua. Across Banten, a 200-strong motorbike gang called the Komunitas Motor Literasi (Moli), brings books to homes from a box attached to their vehicles, delivered with the ease of a takeaway.” – The Guardian

Ali Stroker Talks About Doing Broadway Musicals In A Wheelchair

In the 2015 Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, Stroker became the first wheelchair-user Broadway actor, and she’s now playing Ado Annie (the girl who can’t say “no”) in the revisionist Daniel Fish staging of Oklahoma!. In a Q&A, she talks about what she sees her job as being (and not being) as a “mainstreamed” disabled performer, how she deals with a given theater’s accessibility issues, and showing the public a wheelchair-using character who’s also a sexual being. – Vulture

James Dapogny, Who Brought Musicology Skills To Early Jazz, Dead At 79

In addition to performing as a solo pianist and bandleader, “he applied his vast knowledge of music to transcribing early jazz works from recordings, most notably in his 1982 book Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton: The Collected Piano Music, which helped fuel a rediscovery of Morton (1890-1941), who had fallen out of favor but is now widely regarded as the first great jazz composer.” – The New York Times

MoviePass Is Giving Its A-Movie-A-Day Plan One More Try

“MoviePass Uncapped will have a regular price of $19.95 per month, but the company is offering cheaper deals for what it says is a limited time. If you’re willing to pay for a full year (via ACH payment), it will cost the same as that original unlimited plan, namely $9.95 per month. If you don’t want to make a full-year commitment, it will cost $14.95 per month. Now, you may be thinking that this kind of deal is exactly what got MoviePass into so much trouble last year.” Well, the new Terms of Use have addressed those problems (or so the company hopes). – TechCrunch

US Supreme Court Says UK National Gallery Can Keep Contested Matisse

“Three grandchildren of Greta Moll, the muse depicted in the portrait, had argued that the painting was taken in violation of international law and demanded that the National Gallery pay $30 million in compensation for the painting or return it. But last September, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York affirmed a lower-court decision that the National Gallery and Britain were immune from the jurisdiction of US courts,” and the Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal. – The Art Newspaper