“The first family has spoken frequently of championing the arts, and so far, it appears that it is leading by example. Fresh off a Parisian tour de culture, the Obamas jumped the English Channel and made a visit today to London’s West End theater district, where first lady Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia attended a performance of Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ at the Lyceum Theatre.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Flaw In Series-Writing Emmy: Rules Ignore How TV Works
“Maybe some TV writers don’t care about winning an Emmy, but it’s hard to ignore the attraction: the intrinsic pride and glory, plus an express train to better pay, visibility, hireability or all of the above. Still, there’s an unspoken glitch in the Emmy writing categories for scripted series. Each year, awards go to individual writers or writing teams from a given episode. But many episodes aren’t written by individuals or duos — they’re written by entire staffs.”
Dave Eggers: Buck Up! Let’s Reinvest In Print.
“[M]y weird theory, or one of them, is that we need to invest in print, instead of cutting away all the value of print over the web. Seems like every time a newspaper cuts its size, its investigative budget, its art, its comics, its book review (!) we give readers yet another reason to eschew print and get the equivalent on the web. So I think with books and with newspapers we need to reinvest in what all the things print does best.”
Performances Prove Van Cliburn Jury Got Winners Wrong
The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition has made odd picks in the past. “Yet nothing in recent memory has been as shocking as this year’s top prizes,” awarded by a jury whose errors of judgment “are all too evident if we watch the archived performances on the Web.”
How Broadcast TV Bungled The Digital Transition
“It was going to be glorious, positively Jetsonian. With digital broadcasting, the television industry once promised, the TV set would be transformed into a miraculous info-appliance, the modern household’s electronic brain.” Remember? “Well, the future officially arrives this week, and it’s . . . not exactly as advertised.”
NSO, In China, Finds Universality Of Concert Experience
“In Macau, the [National Symphony Orchestra] was meeting a new audience in a new venue. But there was the same warm, wood-paneled auditorium with red plush seats; the same program bios, here in Portuguese and Chinese; the same ushers pouncing like hawks on young people trying to text on their mobile phones during the show.”
Tony Hype Aside, B’way Needs Other Ways To Draw Crowds
“With last Sunday’s Tony Awards unlikely to provide a serious boost at Broadway box offices because the big winners are already hits, producers are counting on word of mouth and discounts to prevent closings and dark theaters this summer.” Until the fall season begins, “Broadway’s financial health will depend largely on the Tony winners and losers’ finding ways to build audiences at a time when New York tourism — a backbone of summer attendance — is projected to decrease slightly.”
In The Digital Domain, What Belongs To Whom?
“The World Copyright Summit on Tuesday was a unifying effort as the entertainment industry grapples with an uncertain future, but it also highlighted just how polarizing the whole notion of copyright has become in the digital age. A series of panels saw back-and-forth sniping and other disagreement — and, indeed, one expert lamented the very nature of copyright itself.”
Antonia Frasier To Pen Memoir Of Her Marriage To Pinter
“After bestselling biographies of Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette, Antonia Frasier is now turning her professional attentions to her own life, and her marriage to the Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve 2008. Fraser will draw both from her memories and the diaries which she started to keep in October 1968 to write Must You Go? which will be published next January.”
Picasso Sketchbook Stolen In Paris
“A sketchbook of drawings by Pablo Picasso worth about 8m euros ($11m) has been stolen from a museum in Paris, police have said.” The theft from the Musée Picasso was discovered today.