“A recent National Endowment for the Arts report claims that nationally, theater ticket sales are 6 percent lower than they were a decade ago. Yet our small, local companies, who routinely bring us work by provocative young playwrights — plays in which naked people appear, in which topical issues are discussed over coffee, and women exchange the occasional tongue kiss — are thriving.”
Tag: 04.16.17
Claim: London’s Planned Garden Bridge Across The Thames Is A “Post-Truth” Project
The garden bridge, proposed to cross the Thames from the South Bank to Temple, is nothing if not a landmark of the post-truth era. It has wrung tens of millions out of the public purse on the basis of deceptions, distortions and facts that proved to be fake. First sold as “a gift to the people of London”, entirely paid for by private sector donations, it is now due to cost a minimum of £60m in public money. Its estimated total cost has gone from £60m to “north of £200 million”. Its claims to fundraising prowess are exaggerated, its promised transport benefits minimal.
Montreal Gets A Glitzy New Home For Dance
“Les Grands Ballets Canadiens will take over its new digs next month, after 37 years in a converted garage building that had no elevators, insufficient washrooms and studios where ballerinas had to take care not to bump their heads on the ceiling during lifts. The ballet will join two contemporary-dance companies – Agora de la danse and Tangente – as well as École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. All the companies are getting better and more versatile spaces than they had before. They’re also being challenged to think about how to relate to each other, and to their new environment in the Quartier des Spectacles.”
Did the NY Times Pass Up An Opportunity When It Hired Its New Theatre Critic?
“For the greater good of theater criticism as a legitimate form of journalism and for the greater good of theater as an art form, yes, I’d have preferred that the Times authentically looked for, and found, a 30-year-old woman of color or a 34-year-old man of Asian ethnicity or even — in the spirit of a long tradition — pulled some 27-year-old reporter off the sports desk and provided them with a shot.”
French Town Are Being Stripped Of Their Architectural Heritage
Throughout the French countryside, especially in less visited rural areas of eastern and central France, some homes have fallen victim to speculators who strip their architectural treasures and sell them, often abroad, leaving once graceful historic structures little more than empty shells behind gaily painted facades. In other cases, the owners themselves sell the architectural elements to raise some cash.
Battle Breaks Out Over Parking Lot At Britten’s Own Aldeburgh Festival
“The green idyll of the village of Snape and its environs is under threat, menaced by the prospect of a giant car park to serve the increasing number of visitors to the area. As battle lines are drawn, a coalition of local people and music lovers has formed to see off the threat and tempers are becoming frayed.”
Online Ticket Services Are Battling Billions Of Bots
“According to David Marcus, the head of music at Ticketmaster, last year Ticketmaster’s platform successfully defended against 5 billion bot calls. For a company that sells 100 million tickets each year, that’s a staggering ratio—and it means that even a 1 percent failure rate would mean half of their tickets are sold to bots.”
Want To Be A Better Person? Read A Book You Hate
“Reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value, whether it’s a style, a story line or an argument. Because books are long-form, they require more of the writer and the reader than a talk show or Facebook link. You can finish watching a movie in two hours and forget about it; not so a novel. Sticking it out for 300 pages means immersing yourself in another person’s world and discovering how it feels. That’s part of what makes books you despise so hard to dismiss. Rather than toss the book aside, turn to the next page and wrestle with its ideas. What about them makes you so uncomfortable?”
TV’s LGBT Revolution Is Gathering Steam
From inside these communities, there is a clear, rich stream of storylines that are less concerned with the physical details and more with the interior life of LGBT characters. “Look, we know what straight, white men think, what their hopes, desires and fears are, because we’ve been told nothing but them on TV. Which is precisely why a younger generation no longer owns TV sets. Programme-makers have to catch up or they’ll make themselves extinct.”
Amazon Has Become A Major Player In Literary Translations
AmazonCrossing, the publishing unit devoted to scouring the world for good tales, has in a short time become the most prominent interpreter of foreign fiction into English, accounting for 10 percent of all translations in 2016, more than any other publishing house in a field populated by small imprints.