The design of Toronto’s new opera house is… well… pretty dull. “There’s nothing wrong with the new complex, but instead of something spectacular, it is polite, well mannered, deferential, even self-effacing. That would be fine if it were anything else, but this is, after all, an opera house, not a downtown shopping centre. What is opera if not spectacle?”
Tag: 07.03.05
Now That’s A Lot Of Penguins
Penguin is offering a collection of every book it has published. “Laid down page by page and end to end, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection would stretch about 84 kilometres, or about the same distance as a morning commute to downtown Toronto from Kitchener. And it can all be yours — all half a million pages of it — for the low price of $7,989.99.”
The Actors And The Cattle Call
“For the last quarter century, for five days every summer, the League of Washington Theatres has held an open audition — a cattle call for local actors. Eight hundred or so people get to shovel their head shots, résumés and 90-second monologues into the faces of auditors from a couple of casting agencies and 54 local theaters (more precisely, 53 local theaters and, for some reason, the Actors Theatre of Louisville). Your odds aren’t great, but sometimes people get discovered and cast in meaty roles.”
Mass Shakespeare For Kids
Ten thousand children from 400 schools in the UK are taking part is a mass shakespeare event. “The event – One Night of Shakespeare – is a collaboration between the BBC and Shakespeare Schools Festival. Organisers hope to enter the Guinness World Records for the most performances of Shakespeare on one night. Pupils will perform their own interpretations of shortened versions of some of Shakespeare’s plays, directed and produced by their teachers.”
Saatchi Omits Brits
Charles Saatchi, long a champion of Brtish artists, is presenting a show without any homegrown talent. “Saatchi last omitted British artists from an exhibition in the 1987 New York Now show in his north London gallery.”