Stairway To Heaven? Designs Revealed For New Shanghai Grand Opera House

“The building’s most prominent feature will be a helical roof that connects to the ground via a spectacular open-air spiral staircase. Snøhetta has designed this to resemble an unfolding fan, evoking ‘the dynamism of dance and the human body’. The building is reminiscent of the Oslo Opera House completed by the firm in 2008, which also featured a publicly accessible roof that slopes down to meet the waterfront.” – Dezeen

Absurd? Why Would LA County Museum Of Art Spend $650M To REDUCE Its Gallery Space?

Christopher Knight: “What was once a project designed to add nearly 50,000 square feet of critically needed gallery space committed to showcasing the museum’s impressive and still-growing permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other global works of art has been turned on its head. Now, rather than enlarge the capacity, the scheme is to reduce the existing gallery square footage by more than 10,000 square feet.” – Los Angeles Times

Can The Shed Mitigate The Corporate Wasteland Of Hudson Yards?

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group, the Shed is meant to be the cultural giveback that compensates for the vulgar mess of the larger Yards project. Looking a bit like a bubble-clad airplane hangar, it sits on the southern edge of the Yards with two distinct elements defining its architecture: a boxlike form projecting out of the bottom of a high-rise residential tower, and a canopy with translucent plastic side panels, mounted on wheels and rails, that opens onto a public plaza. – Washington Post

Nancy Pelosi Has Stepped Into The Role Of Supporter-In-Chief Of The Arts

Peter Marks: “In the absence of a White House that welcomes the nation’s preeminent composers, painters, scholars and singers to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and let’s face it, many of them would probably say no thanks — Pelosi seems more and more inclined to cast herself as the ceremonial head of state for the arts.” – Washington Post

The Scripts From The Translating-Shakespeare-Into-Modern-English Project Are In

“Four years ago, the news that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival had commissioned modern English ‘translations’ of all of Shakespeare’s plays drew headlines, and no small alarm, from purists who saw it as a kind of literary vandalism. Now, the public will have a chance to judge the full fruits of the effort for itself” as all 39 scripts get public readings in June in New York. Jennifer Schuessler looks into the progress of the project and the guidelines the commissioned playwrights followed. – The New York Times

How ‘Hadestown’ Went From Community Theater To Concept Album To Broadway

The Anaïs Mitchell/Rachel Chavkin musical about two Greek myths — Persephone’s abduction by Hades and Orpheus’s (failed) rescue of Euridice — traveled a long road that went from Vermont and New Hampshire to Manhattan’s East Village to Edmonton to London (the National Theatre, no less) to Braodway. “Along the way [Mitchell and Chavkin] experimented with everything from the set design, to the size of the cast, to their way of thinking about the main characters’ roles in the story.” – Vulture

‘Netflix Of E-Books’ Begins Offering Original Content

Scribd, a subscription service for e-books and audiobooks with over 1 million paying subscribers, is launching Scribd Originals, which will “focus on ‘the space between a magazine article and a book’ — namely, pieces up to 50,000 words in length that are too long to run in a magazine but aren’t long enough to be published as a standalone book.” – TechCrunch

To Increase Access, English National Opera To Reduce Lowest Ticket Prices And Introduce Early Start Times And Relaxed Performances

The London company has held its highest ticket price at £125 and cut its lowest to £10 and is expanding its free-balcony-seats-for-under-18s from Saturdays to Fridays and opening nights. In addition, the company will offer its first-ever relaxed performance (with accommodation for learning-disabled and autistic attendees), and at least one performance in each run of an opera will end by 10 pm. – The Stage