Atlanta Troupe Synchronicity Cancels Remainder of Season

Synchronicity Performance Group planned an extremely tight budget for 2009-10, and the company couldn’t sustain the loss it took on its children’s play Bunnicula, about a vampire rabbit. “As a result, Synchronicity has cancelled the last two shows of its season: Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Brand New Kid, a family show.”

Beneath Buzz Over Huge New Film Studio, A Financial Mess

A “former head of Paramount Motion Pictures certainly sounded like the right man to build a huge movie and TV studio in Massachusetts,” but his $650 million plan for “14 sound stages and a virtual entertainment city in the woods of Plymouth” has been “marred by over-the-top claims, broken promises, legal infighting, and the chronic lack of one crucial ingredient: money.”

New Museum’s Joannou Show Will Be A Win For Audiences

The sermonizing over the New Museum’s upcoming show of a trustee’s collection is a bit much, Jerry Saltz writes. “I like that the art world isn’t regulated. I have seen [Dakis] Joannou’s collection, and it is incredible. And despite the way it looks, I think in the end the whole deal is for the best–given the state of the art world.”

The Trouble With Typefaces

“It’s always a pleasure to discover a formally gorgeous, subtly expressive typeface while walking along a street or leafing through a magazine. But that joy is swiftly obliterated by the sight of a typographic howler. It’s like having a heightened sense of smell. You spend much more of your time wincing at noxious stinks, than reveling in delightful aromas.”

In Concert, Bands Recreate Their CDs (Why?)

“This trend isn’t just exhausted, it feels like a cruel perversion of a concert’s real-time magic. Live music might be the last bastion of unpredictability in today’s hypercurated mediascape: a fleeting opportunity to experience something unfiltered, spontaneous and really real. Instead, we’re paying to see our greatest living, breathing, sweating, bleeding rock stars behave like iPods. And with no “shuffle” function!”