The Minnesota Fringe Festival (America’s largest) is a sprawling affair, offering 800 performances of 156 shows on 18 stages this August. Also, the Fringe is a nonjuried festival, meaning that performers who want to participate have to enter a lottery that decides who gets a slot and who doesn’t, regardless of the relative fame and/or quality of the submission.
Tag: 07.27.08
Not Having To Apologize For What You Like
“Having some standards seems more and more important in a time when the traditional arts have lost a bit of their prestige, some of their audience, and all of their monopoly on perceived quality. As silly as the chaste, Victorian tones of the literary and high culture worlds could be in their heyday, we need a certain amount of seriousness in our lives.”
Tough Guys Are MIA On Broadway
“If I were to be hopeful about it. I’d say it’s a sign that people want to go to the theater and find characters who can help them be hopeful about what can happen in their lives.”
The Bolshoi Method In America
“The United States has numerous summer ballet programs, from small classes in suburban studios to the School of American Ballet’s prestigious program. But the Bolshoi offering, which began with a smaller, trial session last summer in Manhattan and is organized by the Russian American Foundation, is both a camp and a cross-cultural public relations effort.”
Composer Norman Dello Joio, 95
Mr. Dello Joio won awards throughout his career, gathering a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his piece “Meditations on Ecclesiastes” for string orchestra and an Emmy in 1965 for a TV series, “The Louvre,” on NBC. He also wrote works for ballet; Martha Graham choreographed a number of them. The jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw commissioned a concerto from him.
Handicapping The Bayreuth Succession Drama
“Opera-fan websites devote page after page to a microscopic, bitchy examination of the prospects of the three favourites: a glamorous young blonde and two elderly relatives. While all three are members of the Wagner family, no two share an identical set of parents – and each must carry the baggage of her family’s chequered history.”
Why Traditional Music Companies Are Done
Alan McGee of Creation Records says: “The only people who think music isn’t free any more are the record companies.” He gave away the last album by the Charlatans in the hope that it would boost their earnings from live performances. It did, by 400 per cent. That’s where the money is now.
Got That High End Art? Now How About Some Furniture?
“The huge spending power of buyers such as the Russian oligarch and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, who think nothing of spending tens of millions on a Freud or a Bacon, has driven the rise of a new art discipline. Furniture is too mundane a description for its devotees, who have coined the term ‘functional sculpture’.”
Is The Internet Killing Reading? (Or Helping It?)
“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount.”
Batman Beats Record To $300 Million Boxoffice
“The epic Batman saga grossed $75.6 million in its second weekend in theaters, pushing its domestic total to $314,245,000. That surpasses the record set in 2006 by ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,’ which took 16 days to make $300 million.”