Playwright David Hare had mixed feelings going into production of his play about the buildup to the Iraq war. “The power of theater is its unpredictability, the strange alchemy of response that happens only when a group of people examine something together. It’s a bad playwright who seeks to demand a particular reaction. Everyone knows that in performance unpleasant people may begin to acquire charm through energy. Good people, it is said, may seem dull. It was interesting how often members of the audience came out of the show saying “Goodness, I never knew that.” But even more often — and this is where theater really comes into its own — they emerged uneasy to have found their view of the leading players not quite the one they might have anticipated.”
Tag: 05.29.05
A Culture Of Critical Decline
Critics have declining influence? “It is dangerous to be defensive — there’s no question that the critics’ lot has changed for good. Critics now have less power. To the degree that flows from the marginalization of serious cultural inquiry — and it surely does — that fact is to be mourned and fought back against. But to the degree it flows from the empowerment of the audience, reader or listener, it is to be cheered.”
Mixing And Matching Tony’s Best Musical
No one of the musicals nominated for this year’s best musical Tony has all the ingredients of the great show. “If life were fair or the Tonys were smart, next Sunday’s awards would probably be split among the four. We all know that isn’t the way of the world, but just for the sake of argument, here’s the way it should go. ”Spamalot” would win best musical, ”Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” best score, ”The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” best book, and ”The Light in the Piazza” best set design and actress.”
Some Critics And Some Critical Traction
What did America’s critics hope to accomplish by getting together and talking last week? Dominic Papatola: “Will my fellow critics and I reach any grand conclusions here in La-La Land? Perhaps not. Maybe the best we can do is reassure ourselves that, in a world of increasingly slippery standards, we can help to give culture some traction. And then go back home and fight the good fight.”
Movies And The Stay-At-Home Challenge
“With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood. Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, technologies like TiVo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home.”
Missed In Translation
Why is so little literature translated into English these days? “Readers looking for books in translation are now likely to find, at best, a few really big names (Eco, Allende, etc.) and then a lot of obscure stuff, which reinforces the idea of translated-works-as-exotic: sort of like subtitled art-house films, a boutique industry attracting a small, steady audience, but one that finds it hard to attract the average consumer.”
Pianist Ruth Laredo, 67
Ruth Laredo has died of ovarian cancer. “She was particularly known for two sets of recordings: the complete solo works of Rachmaninoff and the piano sonatas of Scriabin, both recorded in the 1970s and re-issued in recent years. Ms. Laredo also recorded works by Ravel, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven, among others, and was nominated for a Grammy Award three times.”
With 400 Critics In A Room…
So what was the scene in Los Angeles at last week’s first-ever joint gathering of five of America’s critics’ associations? “Gather 400 of them and, depending upon the moment you step in, the scene might resemble a learned symposium, a stampede of cats with sharp claws, or a support group for the underpaid and overeducated.”
George C. Wolfe – Exit Interview
Departing director George C. Wolfe on his role leading the Public Theatre: “Very frequently I told people I felt like I was the whore standing in the window in Amsterdam luring certain kinds of artists and luring money into the building.”
Pollock… Or Not?
Two years ago a trove of paintings said to be by Jackson Pollock was discovered. “In the two weeks since the news of the works’ existence – delivered with the help of a Web site and a flurry of press releases – an intense and at times personal battle over who really painted them has been shaping up within a small, once unified group of the world’s leading Pollock experts.”