“Proving that all the world’s a moving stage, a 30-member cast and crew spent a whirlwind winter’s night performing before captive audiences aboard subway trains that served as the combined setting for ‘IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations.’ The two-hour play — which can be a bit shorter on express trains — tells the story of the evolution of the New York City subway system and the men who risked their lives building it.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
For Philadelphia Orchestra, A Humbler ’09-’10 Season
“Reverberations from formidable fund-raising challenges, a steep rise in labor costs, and a depressed economy will rumble onto the Philadelphia Orchestra stage next season. Guest soloists and conductors are being asked to take lower fees, and programming is assuming more modest proportions.” And those aren’t the only adjustments coming.
Please — Don’t Sell It. This Is Ballet.
“An epidemic of flirtiness has attacked our ballet companies. The dancers woo us, grin at us, give us saucy looks. … The situation is worse, of course, in lighter-hearted pieces.”
Roger Angell On Decades Of Editing Updike
“As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: ‘Which one sounds better, do you think?'”
About That Onstage Nudity: Must You Be So Literal?
“I once sat through a fringe Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which the multiple couplings had the entire audience staring at each other, at the ceiling, or indeed anywhere at all rather than the stage, to avoid seeing the naked couple jiggling on the floor just a few feet from our noses.” The reason wasn’t prudery as much as the fact “that simulated sex on stage is more often ludicrous or coy rather than genuinely erotic and tenderly intimate.”
With BookExpo Canada, Toronto Book Fair Bites The Dust
Reed Exhibitions said Monday “that it won’t hold the Toronto-based BookExpo this summer – the first time in more than 50 years that the country has not had an industry-themed spring event for booksellers, publishers, distributors and authors. Less expected was Reed senior vice-president Greg Topalian’s confirmation Monday that Reed was also halting plans for a three-day public event in October, a first, called the Toronto Book Fair.”
‘We Were Never Consulted At All,’ Rose Director Says
“The director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has issued a scathing response to the university’s plans to close the museum and sell off its $350 million art collection, saying he feels ‘shame and deep regret over the shortsightedness of this decision.’ ‘I want you to know from me some basic facts,’ Michael Rush wrote in a statement posted over the weekend on the museum’s website.”
Science Proves It: TV Really Is Depressing
“Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%. Other forms of media, such as playing computer games and watching videos, didn’t affect the risk of depression, according to the study published in the Archives of General Psychology.”
Brandeis’s Next Problem: Angry Donors, Reluctant To Give
“For the trustees at Brandeis University, the easy part is over. Without an apparent word of dissent, all 50 or so trustees approved a plan on Jan. 26 to close the university’s 48-year-old Rose Art Museum and sell its entire 7,180-piece art collection, which was last appraised in 2006 at about $350 million.” The hard part is that “current and future donors to Brandeis may hold a grudge … if they believe that objects donated to the university will be quickly turned into cash.”
As Budgets Are Cut, Culture Chiefs Aren’t Sacrificing
“City- and state-funded cultural institutions are cutting programs and slashing staff – even ‘firing’ the Bronx Zoo’s porcupine – and yet their CEO pay packages would make Wall Streeters blush.” That may be a bit hyperbolic (New York’s culture industry didn’t rake in $18.4 billion in bonuses last year, after all), but the perks for the head of one recently penny-pinching institution do include “an Upper East Side apartment and a full-time maid”….