“As [Kelvin Moon] Loh sees it, the new show preserves the integrity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s composition while stripping away the irrelevant junk that has crept into productions over the years. … There are no taped-back slant eyes or faux-hawkish Samurai hairlines, just stage makeup and severe Victorian middle-parts.” The key device is a newly-created prologue featuring Gilbert, Sullivan, and producer Richard D’Oyly-Carte themselves.
Tag: 12.27.16
Beijing’s Palace Museum Will Build Big New Outpost In Hong Kong
“The 30,500 sq. m museum will be funded with a $450m donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the city’s biggest private charity. The Hong Kong outpost will likely have a contemporary style as it will be designed by Rocco Yim, the Hong Kong architect who designed the new Hong Kong government complex.”
A New Era For “Gay” Plays?
“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype. You might argue that it’s a sign of progress that these writers felt no compunction in writing about troubled, lonely gay characters. Nobody seeing any of these plays today would come away assuming it represented the sum total of gay men’s experience.”
The Battle For Creative Cities – Lessons From Oakland’s Ghost Ship
We appear to be confronted with two very different sets of criteria regarding what can be considered a “safe space.” One is rooted in alternative populations seeking respite from the omnipresent social factory and its all-pervasive marketplace; the other is based on municipal fire-code regulations intended to prevent the type of tragedies that the Ghost Ship now signifies.
How Streaming Is Changing The Art Of Music
Streaming music services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal are shifting not just how music is consumed, but increasingly how it is funded, created and marketed. The talk of the industry is increasingly about playlists and how labels and artists can seed their music into high-rotation mixes on streaming services to blend their new offerings with old favourites.
Is Streaming Helping Musicians Be Artists Again?
“With streaming rather than downloads, access replaces ownership and the commitment is of time, not money. That’s still significant, but it doesn’t feel so irrevocable. Where downloads and playlists favored the lone song, streaming gives the artist and the album a fighting chance again. Anyone interested in a particular artist, from die-hard fans to novelty seekers, can listen to a whole album repeatedly — not just song samples, not just YouTube choices — and let subtler material sink in.”
Mapping Our Political Divide By The TV Shows We Watch
“When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions. Together they reveal a national culture split among three regions: cities and their suburbs; rural areas; and what we’re calling the extended Black Belt — a swath that extends from the Mississippi River along the Eastern Seaboard up to Washington, but also including city centers and other places with large nonwhite populations.”
Midgette: Kennedy Center Honors Demonstrate Marginalization Of High Art
Anne Midgette: “My keenest experience of the Kennedy Center Honors this year had to do with the marginalization of the high arts. This is not usually my position: I have no problem celebrating the artistry of popular culture, placing Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” above the level of many works of contemporary art music or recognizing the quality of “The Wire” and other high-level made-for-television series. And I have been comfortable with the idea that in what is essentially a knockoff awards ceremony, the Kennedy Center should seek to honor the best of American art. But fully recognizing just how marginalized my field is, both before and during the ceremony, was sobering.”
‘They Came After Me With The Fury Of Wasps’: The Woman Who Pretended To Be JT LeRoy Defends Herself
The young demimonde celebrity of the ’00s had a hell of a backstory, which turns out to have been made up by a middle-aged “fat Jewish girl” from Brooklyn. (Her sister-in-law made the public appearances in a red wig.)
Race Mixing, Resistance, Resilience: The History Of ‘Othello’ In America
The Adams family (specifically, Abigail and John Quincy), like many of their day, saw the play as a tale of the dangers of race-mixing; white 19th-century Americans de-blacked the title role; Paul Robeson saw it as an indictment of white racism (and claimed the role for black actors ever afterward). “For more than 200 years, Americans have fought over Othello’s race as a way of fighting over the meanings of race itself.”