Calling the lavish compensation of Carnegie Hall stagehands “an old story,” executive director Clive Gillinson “declined to say whether he would seek to reduce [stagehands’] earnings in future” but said that “reducing overtime by sharing work with others … would have a negligible effect on costs.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Impact Of Carnegie Stagehand Pay On Ticket Prices Murky
“Carnegie declined to say what portion of its $70 million budget (down from $84.5 million two seasons ago) was devoted to stagehand costs, and it is not clear how much those costs contribute to, say, a $154 top-price ticket for a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert next week.”
Might We Be Happier In Another Language?
“[D]o some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?”
The Complicated Friendship Of Auden And Britten
The late-life meeting between estranged geniuses W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in Alan Bennett’s new play, “The Habit of Art,” never took place in real life. Nonetheless, “Bennett’s brilliant conjecture … leads us straight to the heart of one of the most gripping and symbolic relationships in 20th-century culture.”
Miami Art Museum Director Departing At Critical Moment
Terrence Riley said the timing of his resignation “worked very well for me and very well for the project” of building MAM a new, $220 million home. “Riley said he leaves the job with very few regrets. One is that he didn’t do enough to muster the support of Miami’s art heavyweights.”
Placido Domingo Remakes Himself As A Baritone
“Other singers have made the shift — what is unusual is that a tenor should return to his baritone roots at the end of his career. Critics have suggested that the conversion is part of an elaborate preretirement strategy; the singer hoping to end his career on, so to speak, a low note.”
Online Theatre, Done Well, Is A Breakthrough
“[I]t appears that the company [Digital Theatre], which has the experienced stage director Robert Delamere among its founders, has found a way of cracking the perilous transfer of stage show to screen.” It’s no replacement for the live experience, but as cheaper alternatives go? Not bad.
E-Books Draw More Readers To Libraries
“Only a handful of libraries have started to offer the service, but many in the library world are hopeful that the revolution in digital reading can help transform libraries’ fortunes, and that the majority of libraries will soon offer downloads as a matter of course, alongside the latest Dan Brown paperback.”
Did Moliere Suspect? Study Links Miserliness, Testosterone
“‘Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy,’ says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago last week.”
Landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin Dies At 93
“He left his mark at all scales, from the crafting of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square in the 1960s to the transformation of the 52-acre base of Yosemite Falls that was completed in 2005.” Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, called him “the single most influential landscape architect of the postwar years.”