Tag: 05.31.18

Woody Allen To Direct At La Scala

The programme, which opens on December 7th, will include the veteran US director’s riotous rendition of Gianni Schicci, set in New York’s “Little Italy” in the 1930s. Allen’s version, which was a hit in Los Angeles in 2015 with Spanish legend Placido Domingo in the title role, will play in Milan in July 2019.

Prominent Longtime Canadian Classical Music Critic Calls It Quits

“I will add that I’ve enjoyed my years as a critic and journalist writing about music and musicians. It was fun while it lasted, and the free tickets were much appreciated! But at the same time, the precariousness of the work has taken a toll. For the last decade, the life of a freelance critic has become an increasingly difficult and frustrating struggle – and the end-result of the struggle was not any kind of advancement to a more secure, ongoing situation, but just more struggling.”

A Chicago Theatre Critic Moves On, And Reflects On How Being A Critic Has Changed

“When we’re looking at hard numbers, it’s clear that people just aren’t reading this stuff, and theatres are spending most of their advertising, like everyone else, in the digital realm. It used to be that we had seven or eight pages in a weekly magazine to fill with theatre reviews because that was based on advertising from theatres wanting to advertise next to our reviews. That relationship has changed. I think absolutely, if you wanna be taken seriously as an arbiter of culture in this city, you have to have some kind of knowledgeable coverage of theatre. But I guess the question becomes, is it profitable to be a cultural arbiter? I’m not sure that it is.”

The Challenges Arts Professionals Face Everywhere In The World

“How to respond to budget cuts in an unstable economic environment is perhaps the number one struggle. Managing cultural organisations in a sustainable way is not straightforward these days and perhaps it never has been. What has changed is that we are facing the vulnerability of public investment, in parallel with a significant shrinking of private investment. Add to that the extent to which digitisation has affected the creative value chain, from conception to creation, the arts sector is faced with quite a new panorama. And this requires new approaches to the way we work.”

The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels In America’ (As Chosen By The New York Times’ Five Theater Critics)

“Of the plays we’ve singled out as the best 25 of the last 25 years — dated by their first reviews in [the newspaper] — only nine have ever appeared on Broadway, and none originated there. No matter their size, most began on, and many never left, the smaller stages of Off and Off Off Broadway, or were developed at regional theaters. If they have reached fewer people as a consequence, they have told more stories: the kind often ignored during the decades when theater was still a dominant but homogeneous cultural force.”

How The New York Times’ Critics Chose The 25 Best American Plays Of The Past 25 Years (Plus Nods To The Ones They Left Behind)

“We started with 75. … This was encouraging; it meant we found much to love. And many of the same plays were on more than one list. That was good to recognize, too. To get to 25, we eventually realized that we could only include one play by any given playwright, or risk being overrun by a medley of Annie Bakers or Suzan-Lori Parkses. Conversely, we decided that we could not include veteran playwrights just because they wrote great plays before 1993.”

New Clues To The Whereabouts Of Frida Kahlo’s Most Famous Lost Painting?

“The hunt for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting La Mesa Herida (The Wounded Table, 1940) has been revived in Mexico, where a researcher says he expects to track it down within five years. The work, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. Last seen in an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955, it disappeared on its way to Moscow.”

Andrew Garfield And Stephen Spinella Trade Emails On Playing Prior Walter In ‘Angels In America’

“Andrew Garfield, a Tony Award nominee for playing the defiant Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of Angels in America, was 9 years old in 1993, when Stephen Spinella won the first of his two Tonys in the role. As it happens, Mr. Spinella is again tackling the furious, fantastical poetry of Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play, this time as the bilious lawyer Roy Cohn at Berkeley Repertory Theater. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week’s worth of shows. … Below are edited excerpts from their exchange, which included insights on how to understand the character of Prior, a man with AIDS who accompanies an angel to heaven, and how to maintain the stamina to play him.”

The Yellow In Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ Is Fading To Olive-Brown

“A laborious x-ray scan of the painting’s canvas has discovered that Vincent van Gogh used two different types of a chrome yellow paint, one of which is more liable to degrade under light. The change in the 1889 painting, one of a series of sunflowers by Van Gogh, is so far not visible to the human eye but, over time, the painting is set to lose some of its vibrancy in the pale-yellow background and the sunflowers’ bright yellow petals and stems, where the sensitive pigment was mixed to achieve the right green hue.”