“While his substantial contributions are being lauded widely — with an all-star “Celebrating David!” gala earlier this month at the War Memorial Opera House here, the publication of a coffee-table book about his career, and numerous articles and accolades — Mr. Gockley was in an introspective mood during a recent lunch in which he discussed the significant challenges ahead for opera.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Inside A Broadway Show Failure (Case Study)
Four shows flopped this spring at a total loss to their investors. Here, based on interviews with a variety of Broadway figures, is an autopsy report of sorts for “American Psycho,” “Disaster!” and “Tuck Everlasting,” all of which closed in recent weeks, and “Bright Star,” which wraps up on Sunday.
Report From The Front: Is This The Future For Orchestras?
“The young musicians orchestras most need will not gravitate to orchestras. Instead, orchestras will get the blinkered conservatory graduates who don’t care about the institutional life of an orchestra – who will dutifully rehearse and perform. It therefore becomes more than ever incumbent upon orchestras to empower musicians to more fully participate in an expansive institutional mission.”
Is 2016 The Year Jazz Came Back?
“Welcome to the strange jazz resurgence of the new millennium. Jazz is definitely hot again … yet all of this is happening outside of the jazz world. This is a peculiar turn of events.”
This Is How The TV Show Business Model Is Changing
“Network television used to deficit-finance shows and then make those expenditures back through advertising money. The shows would then generate more revenue by getting lucrative syndication deals. But now, cable shows draw in ad revenues, carriage fees, and international sales to satellite, cable, and streaming or on-demand services. When those various revenue streams add up, a show can be profitable from the get-go.”
Profound Cultural Shift: A Changed Relationship Between Schools And Students
“Twinned with colleges’ innovations to attract and serve a new generation of students is a changed relationship between the schools and the schooled. It’s one of the most striking transformations in higher education over the last quarter-century.”
Deadline.com Axes Jeremy Gerard, Its Theatre Columnist
“There is a growing perception among publications of all kinds that it is no longer necessary to have full-time or professional or paid theater journalists (be it critics, reporters, or feature writers). Full-time writers are replaced with freelancers, and freelancers are replaced with interns, or no one at all.”
A Jazz Revival – Where The Jazz Scene Is Thriving (But Where There’s Little Money)
“Musicians like Linda Oh — musicians’ musicians — don’t care that their work isn’t a mass phenomenon; they’re the anti–Taylor Swifts, the un-Beliebers. In that way, they’re countercultural, as were their forebears during Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop revolution uptown at Minton’s in the Forties, or the Ornette Coleman–led free movement unleashed at the Five Spot in Cooper Square in 1959, or the post-Coltrane howls at Studio Rivbea during the loft era, in the decrepit streets of 1970s Soho. That heat and currency appears to be swirling around the jazz world once again.”
How Christo Built His Floating Walkway
“The spectacle part is easy—the floating paths almost compel visitors to try them out, and [the town of] Sulzano expects about 40,000 people a day. But making them work was tricky.”
Buckminster Fuller – Genius Or Fraud?
“Peeling away the myths that Fuller and his acolytes applied to his life like so many layers of fertilizer is no easy task. It’s not for a lack of historical sources. Fuller consciously, even obsessively, documented his own existence, referring to himself as an experiment.”