“[In] this case, according to court papers, the precious 3,200-year-old Assyrian artifact” – a small gold tablet with an inscription – “had been looted, not from the survivor, but from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, at the close of World War II.”
Month: May 2012
What London Protests Against Israeli Theatre Company Looked Like To Protestees
While the actual performances of The Merchant of Venice by Habima at the Globe to Globe festival suffered only quick, minor disruptions, the controversy and calls for a boycott beforehand were loud and vehement. Members of the Habima company give their side of the story.
UK Government Backs Off Plan To Cap Tax Deductions For Charitable Gifts
“The government has dropped plans to impose a cap on tax relief on philanthropic donations, which arts organisations had warned could lead to them missing out on tens of millions of pounds of private support.”
ABT Considers Moving Into NY City Ballet’s Theater (Part-Time)
“American Ballet Theater tours and performs at New York City Center in the fall. A major part of its season takes place in June and early July at the Metropolitan Opera House across the Lincoln Center Plaza from the Koch Theater, where City Ballet performs at roughly the same time.”
New Manhattan Cabaret Wants To Be ‘Broadway’s Living Room’
54 Below – in the space below what used to be the nightclub Studio 54 – opens next week with with a fortnight of shows by Broadway royalty Patti LuPone. “[The club’s] aim is to tilt the axis of the city’s unpredictably evolving cabaret world” away from the old jazz standards and toward modern musical theater.
Stage Director Openly Calls Head Of Vienna Opera House A Liar
William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who has developed a sideline in staging opera, called Theater an der Wien Intendant Roland Geyer the l-word this week (causing a storm in the Viennese press) during a dispute over the company’s revival of Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann.
How Amazon.com Changed Research (And Then Made Us Into Research)
“Devices and technologies that have become second nature to us – scanners and searchable PDFs, for example – first became familiar to many through Amazon. So did disintermediation: the sudden realization that” – thanks to the Search This Book feature – “we could work our way into a subject without taking a box of file cards to a reference room, riffling through catalogs and consulting librarians.”
The Joy Of Fact-Checking With Fred, Ginger, Adele, And YouTube
“Here is the best time an editor might ever have fact-checking: picking through a 3,700-word essay on the song-and-dance partnership of Fred and Adele Astaire.”
Mobile Theater Venue Seats Six, Can Go Almost Anywhere
“Designed by London studio Aberrant Architecture, the Tiny Travelling Theatre” – a red metal box with organ-pipe-style skylights and recessed seating along three walls – is “[i]nspired by small one-to-one spaces, such as a confessional booth or a peepshow.”
The New Yorker Gins Up The Old Prescriptivist-vs.-Descriptivist Language Battle (Again)
“Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round” in the bogus usage wars – revived beginning last month in the famously fussy magazine (to much bemusement on the language geek blogs).