Out Damn Ticket Surcharge!

“At the Birmingham Stage Company we recently went public about our decision to pull out of future presentations at Leeds Grand because of the £3 booking fee and £1 restoration fee that is levied on all tickets. This means that schoolchildren seeing our production of Gangsta Granny by David Walliams for £10 are then being asked to pay another £4 on top. This effectively amounts to a 40% surcharge on every ticket.”

Teachers Selling Their Lessons Has Become Big Business

“Teachers Pay Teachers contends that it hit a milestone last year, when its 80,000 contributors earned more than $100 million, and that at least a dozen have become millionaires since the site launched a decade ago. Other major sites including Teachwise and Teacher’s Notebook, and recently such corporate players as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon, have launched sites of their own. But some educators worry the increasing monetizing of lessons will stifle the longstanding practice of teachers freely sharing their ideas. And legal experts question whether teachers actually have ownership of the lessons they are selling.”

Sculptor Who Made Wall Street’s Iconic Charging Bull Sculpture Says His Work Has Been Appropriated Without His Permission By “Fearless Girl” Creators

The sculptor who created the iconic “Charging Bull” statue in New York City’s financial district says the city and an investment company violated his rights by installing the newly popular “Fearless Girl” statue near his creation without permission for what amounts to a commercial ad campaign.

Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ May Be Saved – By A Grocery Chain

“Perhaps you didn’t know, but The Last Supper … is deteriorating rapidly, mostly due to the factors of time, humidity, wartime bombs, and the fact that it was once housed in a prison.” But Eataly, the upscale food purveyor, is paying for a high-tech contraption that may help save the decaying mural. Nate Freeman has the details (and a bit of snark).

Refugees Form A Theatre Company On One Of Berlin’s Fabled Stages

The Exil Ensemble is “a group of seven performers from Syria, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan who can’t pursue their art in their home countries and who are now in residency at the Maxim Gorki Theater” (whose house director, incidentally, is Israeli). “But how do you turn your own arrival into art so soon? How do you face the trauma? And express yourself in a new language?”