“‘We were surprised it wasn’t being talked about in the national media,’ Mr. Barber said. ‘And then, right when we thought we were done, the events in Ferguson unfolded. And it became talked about at a much higher level.'”
Month: October 2015
Why ‘Hamilton’ Has Caught Fire At This Historical Moment
“It takes only one listen to figure out that Donald Trump will not be one of the show’s numerous fawning audience members or backstage guests. In fact, I’m convinced that every time you listen to the cast recording straight through, one of Trump’s Horcruxes is destroyed.”
Margaret Atwood On Her New Book, And A Lot More
“You can’t face this alternative, so let’s pretend it’s not there. You can’t face global warming, so let’s pretend it’s not there. We know that Santa Claus is really our parents, but we don’t want to look at that too closely. People do that all the time. We know Stephen Harper is a dictator in the making, but he’s convinced some people that they’re going to be financially better off under him, which is untrue.”
Goya’s Bleakest, And Most Modern, Paintings Came From War
“Goya’s close experience of the war brought only disillusionment. Courage is much less visible than cruelty in The Disasters of War: Zaragoza, after all, could only hold out for so long. He remorselessly shows the atrocities committed by both sides. Because this was the first guerrilla war, it released a new kind of violence.”
James Levine Steps Down From Conducting New Opera ‘Lulu’ At The Met
“The announcement did not directly address Mr. Levine’s history of health problems, but said that ‘faced with the demands of rehearsing and performing two large-scale operas simultaneously this fall,’ he would concentrate his energies on Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser,’ which opens on Oct. 8. The overlapping runs of two of Mr. Levine’s favorite operas were to have been a highlight of the Met’s 2015-16 season.”
A Swashbuckling, Cross-Dressing, Sword-Fighting 17th Century Opera Singer Gets Her Own Young Adult Book
“Whenever society starts to think about, what does gender mean, what does sexuality mean, she’s just one of the names that comes up, and people start thinking about her, and talking about her, and portraying her all over again.”
GarageBand: Good Or Bad For Music?
“While audiophiles and classic rock enthusiasts might sneer at the software’s humorously simple design, digital natives simply see it as making something impenetrable now liberatingly accessible.”
The New Arts Center In Buenos Aires Hosts 10,000 Visitors A Day
“Remarkably, everything in it is free, from video installations to comedy acts to symphony concerts.”
Speaking Of Translation … Women Theatre Critics Get It Way More Than Men
“We need to get to a stage in our theatre when a woman can be allowed to tell her own story, without translation – in all its complexity, and grotesqueness, and ugliness, and non-conformity, and sometimes conformity, and sometimes subversion. Not as a feminist statement. But just ‘coz. Because we are women theatre makers and this is how we see the world, and our view is just as valid as the culturally predominant male lens we’ve spent so much time translating.”
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Explains (Further) The ‘Translating Shakespeare’ Initiative
“There will be a dramatist’s perspective in the center of these plays for the first time in 400 years. Typically, we rely on information about the plays from actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, and scholars. I’m asking the writers to go into the plays (I keep joking about giving them coal miners’ hats) and see what they discover about how the plays work from within their structure. Compressing the length of the project to three years also was strategic. I just wanted a snapshot of ‘now,’ how we think about Shakespeare now.”