“For years, theaters have transformed Hughes’ original script, adding songs, and changing settings.” At San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the production “always includes wayward shepherds. They find their way to the baby Jesus by singing songs by musicians who’ve died in the past year.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Senator McCain? Arts Funding Creates Real Jobs
“Artists need and deserve work, just as all Americans do. And their industry is a key engine in our economic recovery. More than 5.7 million jobs in this country are generated by the nonprofit arts sector, and that work touches and enriches the lives of all Americans.”
J.K. Rowling Is Decade’s Top-Selling Author
“With Dan Brown at number three and John Grisham, Danielle Steel and James Patterson also in the top 10, the first literary, or non-genre, author doesn’t emerge until number 37 – Ian McEwan with sales exceeding 4m books. He is just ahead of Sebastian Faulks, the only other literary novelist in the top 50.”
Stopping In On Borders UK’s Last Day
“It was a forlorn scene; the literary fiction and big name biographies that the shop once sold to Islington’s bookish were long gone, leaving a small and somewhat more prosaic selection on display by the door.” Oh, look! “Letters to Penthouse VIII,” only 79p.
Robin Wood, Who Took Hitchcock Seriously, Dies At 78
A film critic who made a splashy debut with a piece on “Psycho” in Cahiers du Cinéma, “Mr. Wood never lost sight of the ethical and political aspects of film. This tendency became more acute after he came out as a gay man in the 1970s and took a sharp turn to the political left.”
If Time Flew, Does It Follow That We’ve Had Fun?
“When people are tricked into thinking that time has ‘flown by,’ they react to their surprise at the passage of time by assuming that it means they must have been having fun, says Aaron Sackett, a psychology researcher at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.”
With A Handheld Device, West End Theatre Translates
“Hairspray” is now “available in the language of Molière eight times a week. And in German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin… even English, for the hard of hearing.” That’s thanks to “the AirScript, a handheld electronic screen, about the size of a tiny clutch, that provides a rolling version of the show’s script in whichever language the user chooses.”
As Fresno Museum Ails, Exhibitor Pulls Chagall Show
“Officials at the [Fresno Metropolitan Museum] have said financial problems could force the museum to close as early as next month, prompting the exhibitor of ‘Marc Chagall: The Early Etchings’ to unexpectedly pull the show Sunday.” The exhibitor “said the Met still owes him nearly $10,000 … and he was worried that the artwork would be locked up in a failed museum.”
$25M From NYC Propels Signature Toward Its New Home
The off-Broadway Signature Theater Company’s Frank Gehry-designed Signature Center “will allow for three unique programs, more than doubling the audience capacity of Signature’s existing base. The project previously had been announced to be part of the World Trade Center Site.”
Boys Choir Of Harlem Is No More
“The choir’s last official performance was in 2007, around the time of the death of its founder, Walter J. Turnbull. But no one ever announced that it was gone. … For a famous organization that politicians had vowed would outlive its founder, it had a quiet end.”