Tag: 12.01.18

Trying To Understand The Met Museum’s Need For An Expansion?

Last year, we heard that the Met had deficits. It pushed people out, cut its budget, and instituted a terrible $25 admission fee for tourists. I’m not given to amnesia, so I’m having a hard time squaring a need to reduce deficits, an unprecedented admission fee, a $70 million gallery redo, and that second baby behemoth, a $600 million new contemporary and modern wing. – National Review

Ben Jonson Wrote A Play So Scandalous That It Got All London’s Theatres Shut Down And Was Wiped From History

“In 1597, Jonson and Thomas Nashe co-wrote a satirical play called The Isle of Dogs. Not much is known about the plot or contents of the show; what is known is that almost immediately after it took the stage, the British authorities not only banned it from ever being performed again, but they also threw Jonson in jail and shut down the entire London theater scene. While the curtains eventually began to ascend again, the play at the center of the controversy lived on only in whispers.” — The Daily Beast

Wherein I Try To Plug In To The Great American Songbook

“I was now connected directly to the heart of the Great American Songbook. It was like knowing a guy who knew a guy who knew God. If the comparison seems blasphemous, let’s recall the central role of the songbook in this nation’s culture. We don’t call them standards for nothing: they exude the off-the-cuff elegance and colloquial zing that are supposed to be our hallmark. Also, they’re beautiful, and economical enough to break your heart with a single phrase.” – The New Yorker

Jeanine Tesori’s Musical Revolution

Tesori, who wrote the music for 2015’s Tony Award-winning Best Musical (and Best Score, not incidentally) Fun Home (oh, and 2004’s Caroline, or Change, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Shrek: The Musical, and, and, and), is having quite a moment. Here’s how she got to Broadway from pre-med.

Can Anyone, Or Anything, Revive The British High Street?

Decimated by online shopping and giant box stores, the British high street needs help. “The identity and self-esteem of entire towns and city districts is wrapped up with retail – what, for example, is a ‘market town’ if it doesn’t have a market? As it has become ingrained that one of the main forms of shared public life is shopping, its loss becomes an existential threat to society.”

WWI, As Seen From The Home Front

You can thank the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery for some of the most indelible images of the home front: “Rilla of Ingleside does an extraordinary job of conveying the anguish and worry of having sons far away in the trenches, fighting endless bloody battles to take and retake small pieces of ground, while at home you have to go on living and working and, all the time, tracking the faraway battles, waiting for the casualty lists, asking again and again, as Rilla writes in her diary, ‘Over there in France tonight — does the line hold?‘”