Ten Ways To Tell If Your ‘Nutcracker’ Is Traditional (And They’re Not Necessarily The Ways You Think)

As Alastair Macaulay points out, changes to the original Tchaikovsky/Petipa scenario have been made ever since the ballet’s 1892 premiere. “Many people crave a traditional Nutcracker, often the one they grew up with. But frequently it turns out that their notion of Nutcracker tradition goes back only to the mid-20th century. … So here are 10 Nutcracker checkpoints to help you work out where your Nutcracker is or isn’t true to the ballet’s heart and (a different thing) its tradition.”

The Show Went On: Rajiv Joseph On How Houston Kept His New Play On Track Through And After Hurricane Harvey

The playwright was one week into rehearsals for Describe the Night this past August when the storm flooded Houston and did $15 million worth of damage to the Alley Theater. He wondered if it was even appropriate for the show to continue – hell, he wondered if his vocation as a playwright was of any use to the world at all – yet, as he writes in this essay, both he himself and the Houston community had deeper resources than he had known.

Santa Fe New Mexican Critic Craig A. Smith, 63, Dead In Apparent Suicide

“He began writing both feature stories and critical reviews [on opera, classical music, and theater] for Pasatiempo [magazine] in 1990 and continued to contribute to both Pasatiempo and The New Mexican after he left the staff around 2010 until the time of his death.” He was also the author of a 2015 biography of Santa Fe Opera founder John Crosby.

Two Groups Of Female-Led Investors Look At Buying Weinstein Co. And Making It A Feminist Concern

“Throwing a lifeline to an entertainment company that has become a symbol of the systemic mistreatment of women in Hollywood would seem like the last thing that feminists like Gloria Allred and Ana Oliveira, chief executive of the New York Women’s Foundation, would be interested in doing. But each is involved with a group holding separate acquisition talks with the embattled Weinstein Company – with the aim of benefiting sexual misconduct victims.”

Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.21.17

Soft power and the arts (3/3)
The rituals behind cultural diplomacy leave me wondering about its effects. That cultural diplomacy is a soft-power approach to achieve hard goals is known by all participants in this game. We “see through” attempts by a nation to use carefully chosen works of art to convey a particular message … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2017-11-21

 

Are Digital News Media Publishers Crashing?

“Online advertising is looking more and more like a contest that publishers can’t win—not on a large scale, at least. Advertising can help to cover some of their costs, but online ads alone won’t pay for big, serious, high-quality journalistic enterprises the way that print ads once did. The idea that the news business needs to find different revenue models—subscriptions, memberships, events, nonprofit status—is hardly new. But it’s time for online media companies to take a harder look at it than they have before.”