“At a bookstore, you can browse the shelves, open a book, sample its pages as well as those of its peers shelved in the same category or by the same author. With Amazon, if you do not know the author or the title or a great deal of the plot; your chances of finding that book you overheard friends talking about is like a pricking yourself while rolling in a haystack.”
Tag: 05.04.14
Picasso Museum In Paris Gets (Yet Another) Tentative Reopening Date
“Five years after it closed for a two-year renovation, Paris’s [Musée Picasso] – which houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of the Spanish master’s work – will finally reopen its doors in September, the culture ministry announced Sunday.”
Revisiting James Joyce’s Dublin 100 Years Later
“If you’re a person whose perception of the world is shaped by literature, Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing. The city of his fiction exists in ghostly superimposition over the actual city … Joyce will not be escaped. He inheres in the city’s bones.”
‘Fun Home’ And ‘Here Lies Love’ Dominate Off-Broadway’s Top Awards
A disco bioplay of Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love took five Lucille Lortel Awards, including for director and lead actress, while lesbian-and-gay-themed musical memoir (and South Carolina lightning rod) Fun Home won the best musical prize and two acting awards. Lisa Kron, who wrote the book for Fun Home, took honors of her own for best featured actress in a play.
What Happens When You Give A Designer Completely Free Rein On A Play?
When that designer is Dmitry Krymov, you get colliding grand pianos, a pram that materializes out of a projection and spills children’s shoes, or skaters acting out the death of Tolstoy and the Sputnik launch. (You also get utterly chaotic rehearsals.)
Has Boston Run Out Of Rehearsal Space?
“The city has run out of rehearsal space. These days there’s hardly anywhere for a cello and a marimba to meet. In neighborhoods across Boston, musicians lug unwieldy instruments up the stairs of triple-deckers for “house” rehearsals because it’s the only place to practice. But leases routinely prohibit the playing of instruments, and, in any case, apartment rehearsals are limited to the goodwill and noise tolerance of neighbors.”
Time For Documentaries To Get Their Own Channel – And Get Seen
“In 2013, ‘Iron Man 3’ sold about as many theater tickets in one day as all of their documentaries did all year. Combined.”
James Baldwin Reappears Just As The Country Desperately Needs Him
“More than once this week I’ve caught myself reading yet another news story about Donald Sterling or Cliven Bundy, wondering what it means for me, a black gay man, to exist in America at the same time as men like them.”
Bel Canto Makes A Strong Return (This Time From The Guys)
“The response of the New York audience has been boisterous. Never before in modern Met history have two different singers in the course of a few days earned applause so long and tumultuous that they had to repeat arias.”
Cell Phone Vandalism Mars Carnegie Concerts
“Sometimes, you almost suspect there are concert saboteurs with cellphones poised to disrupt a performance at the most crucial moment. You see? Here I am going on about an infuriating cellphone when I should be describing the Philadelphia Orchestra’s superb concert.”