“Not so long ago, high-profile revivals tried to be time-travel experiences, replicating the original sets and disinterring original cast members. Now, the pressure is on old works to reveal new things. Sometimes they are forced into it, with revised librettos and resequenced songs. Yet truly canonical works rewrite themselves by not changing a word or a note. History does that for them…”
Tag: 05.18.03
Reading On The Decline In Japan
Japan has a proud literary tradition – it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. But reading seems to be in a sharp decline. “Once upon a time, one could look into a Japanese train and expect to see people doing one of two things: either sleeping or reading. But today one sees commuters who are preoccupied with portable electronic games, digital assistants and cell phones which enable them to send e-mail and surf the Net.”
A Tony Field That Actually Means Something
Where are this year’s outrages among the Tony nominations? Usually there’s at least something the nominators did that offends. “For the most part, however, the nominating committee has sorted heroically through the season’s extremely peculiar mixture of shows. The awards, to be dispensed June 8 on CBS, are not likely to be placed in unworthy hands. What hurts my head this year more than ever is the necessity of having to choose at all.”
The Gray Lits
You might think, the way we lionize the latest young writer that only the young can write a compelling book. “Older people aren’t newcomers to literature. But older characters have tended to spend their time recalling their youths or coming to terms with their mortality. Now we are seeing the rise of books about sexto-, septo- and octogenarians who are seizing the here and now.”
Will WalMart Decide What You Read Or Listen To?
With the big mass retailers like WalMart now accounting for 40 percent or more of sales for books and music, their influence on what gets sold is growing. “But with the chains’ power has come criticism from authors, musicians and civil liberties groups who argue that the stores are in effect censoring and homogenizing popular culture. The discounters and price clubs typically carry an assortment of fewer than 2,000 books, videos and albums, and they are far more ruthless than specialized stores about returning goods if they fail to meet a minimum threshold of weekly sales. What is more, the chains’ buyers ? especially at Wal-Mart ? carefully screen content to avoid selling material likely to offend their conservative customers.”
Women’s Writing Is More Than Chick Lit
“It may sound ridiculous, but judging by the clichéd offerings in the bookshops at the moment, much of the great romantic writing by women would never have seen the light of day if it had been submitted to today’s publishers. Manderley would have sustained minor fire damage. Rochester’s blindness would become acute hay fever. Cathy and Heathcliff would have had near-death experiences, survived, married. You get the picture. Now I’m not knocking the writers who succeed in either the chick-lit or the mummy-lit genres. However much we enjoy these books, and I do, they provide a pretty limited literary diet. Why should we be forced to endure a long summer on a selection of novels where tragedy is a sick nanny and failure is a lacklustre dinner party?”
Frank Rich To Bill Bennett: Blame It On Tupac
“It is almost too perfect that Las Vegas, the city where Tupac Shakur was murdered in 1996, would be the undoing of William Bennett. In 1995, Mr. Bennett, serving as America’s self-appointed cultural commissar, made a target of Tupac, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other practitioners of gangsta rap. They were public enemy No. 1 in his relentless battle against what he was fond of calling ‘the filth, sewage and mindless bloodletting of the popular entertainment industry.’ Mr. Bennett was above such vulgarity. He had been secretary of education. He had attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for perpetrating junk. He had anthologized Plato and Aesop in The Book of Virtues. But the guy just couldn’t keep away from Vegas.”
Innovative In The Sense Of Stupid
Dave Barry is America’s preeminent humor columnist, and for some time now, he has been fascinated by the predilection of British art museums for “paying large sums of money for works of art that can only be described as extremely innovative (I am using ‘innovative’ in the sense of ‘stupid’).” Having previously questioned the legitimacy of Martin Creed’s flickering lights, Barry is now doubled over by the news that artist Ceal Floyer has won a major award for a bag of trash. “To judge from the photograph in the Times, it is a standard black plastic garbage bag, just like the ones you put your garbage in, except of course that you have to pay people to haul your garbage bags away, whereas Ms. Floyer got $47,000 for hers.”
Is London’s Boom Killing The Thames?
“Everything that makes London look like London is being destroyed. Such is the cry of the latest panic over London’s architectural landscape, this time inspired by Renzo Piano’s plan to build Europe’s tallest skyscraper, a 1,016ft glass shard, at London Bridge. In this instance the outcry centres on its impact on the river, and last month’s public inquiry into the project heard a lot about the damage the tower threatened to do to the historic views of the Thames.
But it is already far too late. There are no historic views any more. As a journey downriver, from Hammersmith in the west all the way to Wapping and Deptford in the east, reveals, the damage has already been done.”
John Adams, Voice of America
“An interesting thing has happened to John Adams during the past year or so. With neither discussion nor fanfare, he has become America’s composer laureate.” Not bad for a guy who saw performances of his music cancelled after 9/11, and has often been sharply criticized for an opera based on a real-life terrorist attack. The fact is, though, that America hasn’t had a true National Composer since Copland. “Samuel Barber’s music, for instance, is too genteel, [Charles] Ives’ too ornery and disruptive, Leonard Bernstein’s too inconsistent, Elliott Carter’s too ugly.” Adams, it seems, is just about right.