Until April (when she left amid worries about “corporate sabotage”), Chase Robinson was “vice president of production and finance’ at De Niro’s Canal Productions, drawing a $300,000 salary. Canal’s suit accuses Robinson of embezzling cash, using corporate credit cards for lavish spending on hotels and meals, taking personal trips using De Niro’s frequent flyer miles — and, on top of it all, rarely coming to work and spending what time she was in the office binge-watching Netflix. – Variety
Tag: 08.19.19
Lynn Nottage On Staying Political
Nottage is the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: for Sweat and Ruined. The former reached Broadway, while the latter – a story about women in war-torn Congo – played a sustained Off-Broadway run. As a result of where they were first staged, the plays have had somewhat different lives after their New York engagements. – The Stage
What, Exactly, Is A Museum? International Council Of Museums Is Having A Bitter Fight Over That Question
“On 12 August, 24 national branches [of ICOM] — including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums’ international committees — requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums.” Said one veteran art journalist of the proposed revision, “At first, I thought this was a joke”; the chair of the International Committee of Museology maintains that not even the Louvre would qualify as a museum under the proposed revision. – The Art Newspaper
San Francisco’s Commercial Theatre Titans Settle Years-Long Legal Battle
“By terms of a settlement announced Monday, Aug. 19, [Carole] Shorenstein Hays will give up her half ownership of SHN, operator of the Orpheum and Golden Gate Theatre. [She] will retain her ownership of the Curran as a separate entity. [Hays and former business partner Robert Nederlander] are now free to compete for Broadway productions, a sticking point to their prior arrangement that had led to years of costly lawsuits over noncompete clauses between the theaters.” – San Francisco Chronicle
London’s National Theatre Says 35 Percent Of Its Plays By Living Writers Were By Women Last Season
This figure is still 15% short of the NT’s stated 50/50 target for gender representation, which the theatre has said it will achieve by 2021. It is also below the 42% figure recorded in 2016/17. However, the theatre argued that it is still “on course” to meet its targets. – The Stage
At What Point Is A Dance Move Cultural Appropriation?
“People think that all you have to do is have certain postures, wear certain clothes, dance to certain music” to make it hip hop, Michele Byrd-McPhee says, pointing out that simply donning toe shoes and tutus and dancing to Tchaikovsky does not a ballerina make. “It’s that kind of disconnect from the origins of the culture and the people who created it that’s problematic.” – Dance Magazine
Martha Over the Years
When Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, stepped through Jacob’s Pillow’s front curtain to introduce the group’s performance, she mentioned that this was the 94th year of the MGDC, which made it the oldest dance company in the United States. – Deborah Jowitt
The Director Happily Tackling Six Hours Of Shaw
Kimberley Rampersad was a dancer who started to sense that dance jobs would dry up – and it was time to move into directing. Now, she’s got Man and Superman, all six hours of it, on her plate, thanks to her previous work – and to Mark Rylance. – The New York Times
An Author Won A Prize For Her Debut Novel, And She Split The Prize With The Other Nominees
Olivia Laing won a £10,000 prize for her novel Crudo over the weekend. But Laing said, in her acceptance speech, “Crudo was written against a kind of selfishness that’s everywhere in the world right now, against an era of walls and borders, winners and losers. Art doesn’t thrive like that and I don’t think people do either. We thrive on community, solidarity and mutual support and as such, and assuming this is agreeable to my fellow authors, I’d like the prize money to be split between us, to nourish as much new work as possible.” – The Guardian (UK)
Orwell Is Being Rewritten Into Newspeak (On Amazon)
Sure, some of this is funny – “One edition of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story referred to itself on the back cover as Animals Farm: A Fair Story. The preface referred to another great Orwell work, Homage to Catalonia, as Homepage to Catalonia – but overall, not so great (or funny). “Until recently, improving Orwell was not a practical business proposition. Then Amazon blew the doors off the heavily curated literary world.” – The New York Times