“Vulture sat down with director David Cromer, book writer Itamar Moses, and composer-lyricist David Yazbek, and Lenk — are all nominated for Tony awards in their respective categories, added with another seven for the show’s total 11 nods — to talk about the process of translating scene into song and creating a number that is unlike anything most people, the creative team included, traditionally believe Broadway is supposed to be.”
Tag: 05.31.18
Why Was Elevator Music Invented? (The Standard Explanation Is Probably Bogus)
“The most popular theory about the origins of music on elevators, repeated everywhere from the New Yorker to the writer Joseph Lanza’s history of Muzak, is that elevators were terrifying, and people needed the music to calm their frazzled nerves. … Yet on closer interrogation, there are a few holes in this explanation. The earliest known references to music in elevators are from the early 1930s … Were people really afraid of elevators nearly 80 years after they were invented?”
The Vermont Town That Has Way Too Many Organs
“In its heyday, the Estey Organ Company factory was the beating, bleating heart of Brattleboro, Vermont. It produced more than half a million organs in total and, at its peak, employed more than 500 people. On a fateful day in 1960, however, the assembly lines shut down and workers departed. After nearly a century in operation, the organ factory had gone silent. And then, like the most improbable boomerangs, the organs started coming back.”
A Renaissance In Queer Stand-Up Comedy
E. Alex Jung surveys “a larger seismic shift that has occurred in the past few years: Instead of gay people trying to fit into traditionally heterosexual and male comedy spaces, they’re creating a gay paradigm. … What distinguishes it today is a queer sensibility. It’s queer comedy: stranger and more off-kilter than ever before, with a distinctly camp flavor.”
Salman Rushdie: Truth Is Under Attack. But It Has Always Been So
In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the U.K., and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.” However, the defenders of the real, attempting to dam the torrent of disinformation flooding over us all, often make the mistake of yearning for a golden age when truth was uncontested and universally accepted, and of arguing that what we need is to return to that blissful consensus. The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea.
Rosanna Arquette Explains How Her Rejection Of Harvey Weinstein’s Attempted Assault Tanked Her Career
Arquette says he called her to his hotel room and essentially tried to assault her – and when she refused him, he told her she was “making a big mistake.” After she left, “‘Got down the elevator. By the time I got to the bottom, the lobby, I had a completely different career,’ Arquette says. Roles started to disappear, and new opportunities didn’t seem to come.”
Online Art Crits: Will They Democratize Art Education?
A Rhode Island School of Design professor, along with several teaching assistants, are working for free to establish online art critiques as part of a free online art school. Impressive, and perhaps deserving of funding by … someone: “The overall goal of Lieu’s online art classes and critiques is to provide artists and hobbyists outside of major art hubs, schools, and communities with the opportunity to receive serious instruction and feedback that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.”
Walt Whitman Got Rejected From ‘The Atlantic’ For Being Too Timely
That’s right, “1861” was a little too 1861 to publish in 1861. “There’s something problematic about asking our art to be of the ‘moment’ (or declaring, after the fact, that it is), or demanding that it fit into one of two boxes: being about politics or an escape from it. Art is and should be more complicated than that.”
MoMA Workers Protest For Higher Wages Outside Museum Fundraiser
This isn’t the first time MoMA’s unionized workers protested for their rights. In a scene very similar to that of 2015, “chanting ‘Modern art, ancient wages’” and ‘Shiny new building, shabby old wages,’ about 100 members and supporters of UAW (United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers) Local 2110 — the union that represents some 250 workers at MoMA including curators, librarians, store staff, members services workers, graphic designers, and catalogue editors — took the opportunity of the museum’s biggest annual fundraiser to draw attention to their fight for a contract that protects their health care, job security, and wages.”
Assessing The State Of NY City Ballet After Peter Martins
City Ballet — still the world’s most valuable company for the excellence of its classical-modernist repertory — is in remarkably good shape. Had Mr. Martins resigned a decade or two earlier, the same could not have been said. Just what happened to make the difference in the years 2008-18? There are multiple answers. Dancers have learned again to step off balance into space and to embody their music rather than merely to follow it; and a number of excellent new ballets have revitalized the company’s sense of mission.