Paula Vogel is high on a new generation of playwrighs. “In the past 30 years I have not seen such an extraordinary flowering of talent — so attention must be paid. I think these playwrights are post-post-modern. They are using different strategies other than irony.. television has brought irony to its height and perhaps that’s why theatre is turning away from that.”
Tag: 09.12.07
Longtime Toronto Symphony Concertmaster Steps Down
Violinist Jacques Israelievitch is stepping down as the concertmaster for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra after 20 years at the post.
What’s Wrong With The New Yorker’s Festival
Rose Jacobs is a fan of The New Yorker. But the magazine’s popular annual festival? Not so much. “Well, yes, but when a magazine made great for being literary, worldly, and esoteric spawns a festival just the opposite–self-satisfied and predictable–more analysis is due.”
Web Dictates New Rules For Restaurant Critics
“Does being identified really affect a critic’s experience? (Restaurants can change the service and the ingredients, but can a bad kitchen ever turn out great meals on demand?) Is the traditional rule of reviewing anonymously really just a game (or only a performance of kabuki)? And why not just come clean in a world that seems to have become one big virtual confessional?”
American Indian Museum Names New Director
“The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Kevin Gover, a lawyer and former Interior Department official with no museum experience, to succeed W. Richard West as director of the National Museum of the American Indian… [Officials said that] Gover’s lifelong work with Indian nations qualified him for the job.”
Cleveland Clinic Removes Painting After Complaints
” A controversial painting removed from display last week at the Cleveland Clinic includes depictions of blacks that many employees viewed as racially stereotypical, Clinic officials said Monday. Numerous employees at the Cleveland Clinic complained last week about the painting, ‘My Home Town,’ by Cleveland artist Michelangelo Lovelace, who is black. Lovelace, in turn, said last week that he had been censored when the Clinic replaced the work with another of his paintings.”
“Revolutionary” Off-Broadway Theater Facing Closure
“A state-of-the-art off-Broadway theater owned and operated by two of Broadway’s top producers is riddled with debt and faces possible foreclosure and bankruptcy… The theater – 37 Arts, recently home to In the Heights – was supposed to revolutionize off-Broadway when it opened to much fanfare in 2005.”
Wheeling & Dealing Big Business At TIFF
The acquisition and rights deals struck against the backdrop of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival are expected to surpass last year’s record of CAN$50m. “A small Canadian or foreign film sold to an international broadcaster may not seem like much of a headline grabber, but multiply that many times over and you get a sense of the volume of transactions.”
What’s The Career ERA On That Bassoonist?
Orchestras have long believed that the best way to get their audiences to feel personally connected to the organization is to introduce them to individual musicians. In Houston, that philosophy has taken an unusual turn, as the Houston Symphony unveils a set of 33 trading cards, complete with the personal “stats” of the featured musicians.
Mass. Doles Out $16.7m For Arts, But Stiffs Citi Center
“In a move hailed by arts leaders across Massachusetts, the state’s new Cultural Facilities Fund yesterday allocated an unprecedented $16.7 million worth of grants for building projects to more than 60 arts and cultural organizations throughout the state. But noticeably absent from the list of recipients was the Citi Performing Arts Center.”