“Billed as the first freestanding building in the West built for jazz performance and education, the center opened Wednesday after raising more than $60 million over more than a decade to build a home for SFJAZZ, the nonprofit that puts on the city’s jazz festival.”
Month: January 2013
Benjamin Millepied To Head Paris Opera Ballet
“Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and a former principal at New York City Ballet, will be the new director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, starting in September 2014.”
Royal Shakespeare Co. To Stage Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Novels
“The RSC [has] won the rights to stage versions of Hilary Mantel’s two blockbusting novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. … The books are being adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton and will be directed by Jeremy Herrin in the Swan theatre [in Stratford].”
US Court Considers ‘Last Great Holocaust Art Restitution Case’
“The unusual case was brought by heirs and relatives of a legendary Hungarian art collector in a dispute over possession of more than 40 artworks valued at $100 million – including some paintings in the collections of Hungarian museums – that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.”
Why People Care Whether Beyoncé Lip-Synched At The Inauguration
“Beyoncé’s performance makes us nervous when juxtaposed with the earnest idealism of the inauguration. … [Her] fakery, it seems, implies some larger fakery at the heart of the whole enterprise. … We don’t want to be reminded that we’re watching mere mortals who might trip on their way to the podium, stutter through the oaths of office, shiver in the cold, or worse, err in judgment and lead the country on the wrong path.”
Iowa Court Extends Free-Speech Protections To Online Publishers
“The Iowa Supreme Court has given protections against libel lawsuits to Internet publishers but declined to extend them to average citizens, a ruling that media lawyers called significant Monday.”
New York Times Classical Music Editor Steps Down
“Classical musical critic [sic] for The New York Times James Oestreich has accepted the paper’s buyout and will retire at the end of the month … but will continue to advise the Times on classical music coverage through the spring and write for the paper on a freelance basis.”
What Oestreich’s Tenure At The Times Meant For Classical Music
“I wanted there to be something on the Internet, not just in Twitter form, that fleshes out a bit the importance that Jim Oestreich’s 24 years at the Times has meant to classical music” – which is more than you might think.
Forget Novels – Bret Easton Ellis’s Real Art Form Is the Tweet
Twitter mixes literature (of an admittedly minimal sort) with performance, and it’s perfect for Ellis, who has always been, when you think about it, more of a conceptual artist than an author. … In this new métier, each part of his persona is on view: satirist, nihilist, glamour guy, exhibitionist, knee-jerk contrarian, self-pitying cokehead, and a few other things.”
Julie Taymor Returns To Stage Directing With Midsummer Night’s Dream
For her first new staging since her involvement with the Broadway Spider-Man degenerated into litigious acrimony, Taymor will direct the Shakespeare comedy this fall to inaugurate the new Brooklyn headquarters of the company Theater for a New Audience.