In a production of Kira Obolensky’s Cabinet of Wonders: An Impossible History, “much of what’s on stage is also on sale. … An honest-to-goodness tag sale takes place one hour before each performance. Ticketholders who see something they like pay for it and take it home that night.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Melding Obi-Wan, Orchestral Music And Arena Staging
The target audience for “Star Wars: In Concert” includes fans of the movie, rock ‘n’ roll concertgoers and, “a distant third, classical music aficionados. … [T]he show’s organizers are hopeful that the grown men who wear Darth Maul costumes to ‘Star Wars’ conventions might somehow be smitten by an easy-to-digest taste of an adagio, glissando and rondo.”
Lost Symbol Is No Exception To E-Book Sales Rule
“Fans of ebooks are always on the lookout for a magic bullet — a killer app, a brilliant new device, a groundbreaking title — to bring them to greater prominence. With the out-of-the-gate Kindle sales of ‘The Lost Symbol,’ it looked like they’d found their rocket.” And yet they hadn’t.
PEN USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award To Elmore Leonard
Leonard’s “fiction — with swift prose and slick characters — is often tapped for screen adaptation, notably with ‘Out of Sight,’ ‘Get Shorty’ and ‘Jackie Brown.'”
With Party’s Blessing, Contemporary Art Blossoms In China
“Every movie studio, theater, music house, publisher and publication in China is either directly owned by the state or subject to state guidelines. Contemporary art … is a bright exception. The sector has thrived in part because” of the Communist Party’s “willingness to let at least some flowers bloom.”
In Praise Of Audacity On The Opera Stage
“Directors should claim the freedom to reinterpret a work.” But productions that don’t go far enough in breaking with tradition, like Luc Bondy’s “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera, can be far less successful than an “unabashedly avant-garde approach to a staple,” like Achim Freyer’s “Ring” cycle at the Los Angeles Opera.
Where Old Recordings Gain New Life
“[I]nside an oak-paneled studio on West 44th Street in Manhattan … a small team from Sony Music Entertainment performs the divine digital act of preserving the company’s archives,” digging “into a storehouse of recordings, from Sousa and Caruso to Dylan and Miles Davis, protecting the unique and the endangered from the erosions of the past.”
In Hybrid E-Books, Videos Supplement The Text
“[T]he notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment. … But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading.”
Spielberg And Lucas Do Norman Rockwell At Smithsonian
“The Smithsonian American Art Museum is expected to announce Thursday that more than 50 [Norman Rockwell] drawings and paintings from the private holdings of [George] Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg will be shown at the museum next year. … One of the exhibition’s themes will be the connections between Rockwell’s art and the movies.”
The Cautionary Tale Of Seattle Art Museum’s WaMu Deal
When the Seattle Art Museum “opened a glistening glass-and- metal-paneled, $86 million addition in January 2007,” it couldn’t have foreseen the demise of its partner in the expansion, Washington Mutual. In retrospect, compromises it made to accommodate the doomed lender offer lessons in expansion for the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions.