“After 11 seasons of fizzle-outs, it doesn’t look like The Voice is in the business of really making superstar dreams come true. But it has perfected the art of selling the glittering El Dorado promise of the American Dream, a myth so enticing that it still draws seekers, though all evidence suggests they probably won’t find what they’re looking for.”
Tag: 03.27.17
Oregon’s Troubled Eugene Opera Parts Ways With Its General Director
In January the company cancelled the second half of its current season after racking up $200,000 in debt. General director Mark Beudert lives in Indiana and ran Eugene Opera on a part-time basis – a situation about which the board chair said, “We’ve just reached a stage where that as a model is not going to work for us.”
Ex-NYT Theatre Critic Charles Isherwood Joins Startup Broadway Website
“Isherwood will be writing for Broadway News, a new online venture from Broadway Briefing, an aggregator of theater news. Isherwood will be joined in reviewing by Elizabeth Bradley, an arts academic at New York University and former producer, manager and administrator with long ties to Canada’s Stratford Festival and the Sony Centre in Toronto, among others. The new site will launch next week.”
Hollywood Studios Push To Release Movies On Video Sooner After Theatrical Runs
Though details have yet to be finalized, most of the studios agree that they must come up with new ways to shorten the gap between a movie’s theatrical release and its home video debut.
An Industrial Hellscape On A Giant, Round Conveyor Belt: ‘The Hairy Ape’ At The Armory
Erik Piepenburg visits Stewart Laing, designer of the enormous, glaringly colored sets that revolve around the audience in director Richard Jones’s revival of the Eugene O’Neill play.
Why John Leguizamo Writes Scripts For Himself
“It got so demoralizing. I’d gone to NYU and I’d trained with some of the great acting teachers and I was constantly doing Murderer No. 2 or Janitor No. 3 and it was just like, ‘Am I always going to have a number next to my name?'”
Actress Playing ‘Malvolia’ Hits Back At Telegraph Column Arguing Actresses Should ‘Get Their Mitts Off Male Actors’ Parts!’
Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish used the current National Theatre production of Twelfth Night, which features Tamsin Greig as a female Malvolio, as a jumping-off point for a column suggesting that gender-reversed casting is becoming entrenched and that actresses – and theatres – should spend energy finding and developing female equivalents to the roles of, say, Hamlet or Willy Loman. Now Greig has responded, saying not only that Cavendish used “slightly unenlightened vocabulary,” but also that “he would not have dared to say anything if it had been a black man playing Malvolio.”
‘Who Owns That?’ Roberta Smith On The Kara Schutz-Emmett Till Controversy
The New York Times‘s co-chief art critic looks at how the debate over Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial has developed, reminds us that African-American opinion on the issue is not monolithic, and suggests that those calling for the painting to be suppressed or destroyed have more in common with, for instance, Rudy Giuliani’s crusade against Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary than they might like to admit.
The Philadelphia Orchestra Is Playing Pat Metheny This Weekend – And It’s Not A Pops Concert
David Patrick Stearns talks with orchestra percussionist Chris Deviney about the concerto he’s fashioned out of three cuts from Metheny’s album An Imaginary Day.
Rodin’s Mistress Steps Out Of His Shadow With A Museum Of Her Own
“Better known for her passionate, tragic relationship with Rodin and her 30-year confinement in a psychiatric hospital near Avignon, [Camille] Claudel was largely forgotten as an artist until the late 1970s. The new museum holds most of the sculptures that she did not destroy when her affair with Rodin ended.”