Month: March 2006

Where’s The Operatic Shakesepeare?

The Royal Shakespeare Company is staging the complete works of Shakespeare. So why don’t the operas based on the Bard get performed more often? There are “more than 400 operatic adaptations of the plays – 40 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alone. The archive of Shakespeare in opera is also rich in aborted projects. Mendelssohn, Schumann, Glinka, Bizet and Prokofiev all dreamed of setting Hamlet.”

A First: Download Makes No. 1 On UK Charts

For the first time, a song sold through downloads has reached No. 1 on the UK pop charts. “Until this month, download sales could only count towards a chart position if it was also available to buy in stores. But a change in the rules has enabled download sales to be considered – as long as physical copies of the single go on sale the following week.”

An Islamic Show in A Political Dance

“Without Boundary” is “the most important exhibit MoMA has launched in at least a decade, and it’s the first exhibition of contemporary art from the Islamic world in a major American museum since 9/11.” But “the exhibition is a reminder of the difficulties that museums face when it comes to merging — or not — art and politics.”

Dinner Theatre Lands World Premiere

A Minnesota dinner theatre lands the rights to produce the world premiere of “Easter Parade,” a stage version of the classic 1948 movie with music by Irving Berlin. “Though new musicals frequently begin life outside New York, it’s unusual for a theater — particularly a dinner theater in the suburbs — to earn the right to develop a high-profile title on its own. The Chanhassen production, scheduled to open in February, will be the template for amateur and professional productions. It could have a life on the road and has an outside shot at advancing to Broadway.”

Louise McBain Builds An Empire

Louise McBain has been on a tear, building an empire of art publications and inserting herself into New York society. “I am ambidextrous and dyslexic, with a lively creative spirit. As a child, I didn’t know which hand to use, or which side of my brain to use. It took me a long time to develop confidence in my creativity. I realized that thinking out of the box didn’t make me out of my mind.”

Elevator Music – Junk Food For Our Emotions

“Perhaps the use of muzak is in part a reflection of our preoccupation with gloss and spin – buff up the surface, attend to every external area of presentation and, with luck, anything goes underneath. But more than this, the use of muzak is pernicious because it is manipulative. Its effects, like those of the constant bombardment of sexual imagery, are insidious. We should be under no illusions: the power of music to manipulate our emotions is well known and widely exploited. And formulaic muzak stimulates only the very shallowest of our emotions, arousing or lulling our surface senses to order.”