“Polly Carl, who has served as artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis for seven years, will leave the Twin Cities in September to take a job with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. … The Minneapolis-based service organization serves as both midwife and research-and-development lab for new plays.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
More Challenging Fare Could Help Ballet To Thrive
“We’re in a recession that may prove a depression. One way for ballet to survive is to keep shoveling out ever more fouetté turns and grandes pirouettes and multiple entrechat-six and circuits of turns or jumps on the assumption that audiences can’t get enough of them. Another is for those in charge to help audiences become more intelligently interested.”
Artists Find The Upside Of Straitened Circumstances
When The New York Times posted a request on its website, asking artists to say how the economy is affecting them, hundreds responded. “Perhaps most striking about the comments was the considerable number who were defiantly upbeat despite grim circumstances. … There was a determination to many of the messages, a conviction to push through this rough patch and make the most of it.”
‘Signed Copies’ Of Authors’ Books Were Forger’s Handiwork
“An Exeter Township man pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to making more than $300,000 over six years by forging the signatures of famous authors in books and selling the books online.” Investigators said that Forrest R. Smith III “forged the names of authors, living and dead” — including Tom Clancy, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut and Anne Rice — “and sold the books on eBay.”
A California Bill Would Funnel Funding To The Arts
“Arts institutions in California need all the money they can get at this point, and a new bill currently making its way through the halls of Sacramento is poised to help. If it can only make its way out of committee, that is.”
Suggested: A New Motto For The NEA
“The endowment’s current slogan is ‘A Great Nation Deserves Great Art.’ Wince. That imperial bit of provincial pomposity has things exactly backward.”
Orange County PAC Uses Gala To Raise Its Dance Profile
The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s “Gala Dance Spectacular” tomorrow night is “centered on the world premiere of ‘Fallen Angel,’ a new work by Boris Eifman,” but the starry evening isn’t intended as a fundraiser. “The idea behind this program … is to make an investment in OCPAC’s reputation as a presenter of international dance and center for the development of new work.”
What If P.G. Wodehouse’s Characters Had Sex?
“During most of Wodehouse’s long career, writers and readers had yet to reach an accord by which the former would knock down the bedroom walls and the latter would peer in. Much the same is true of, say, the screwball comedies of the 1930s. … It’s not a matter of morality or prudery, I would argue, but almost one of genre.”
Women On The Verge Of … Breaking Into Song Onstage
“A tuner adaptation of ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ is in the works. The developing musical will get a week of creative work hosted by Lincoln Center Theater this summer.”
Guggenheim’s ‘Scent Opera’ To Be An Olfactory Cavalcade
“Christophe Laudamiel, … a French fragrance designer who has created perfumes for Clinique, Estée Lauder, Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors, is collaborating on a ‘scent opera,’ a new performance art that pairs music with a carefully orchestrated sequence of smells, some pleasant and some real stinkers. … In a darkened theater, audiences will be bombarded with smells, blasted in six-second sequences by a scent ‘microphone’ attached to each seat.”