Performing on Second Life, the Sawston Players are “following in the footsteps of comedian Jimmy Carr (who was the first to do an interactive internet gig) by presenting the first online musical. I can’t disagree with composer and musical director Graham Brown, who says it’s a neat way to drum up a bit of publicity in the run-up to the Fringe. But can the performance be described as theatre in any other sense?” And “could it actually damage its real-world equivalent?”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
L.A. Noir Novelist Gets A Posthumous Second Chance
“Like a lot of noir novels, the career of Douglas Anne Munson, a hard-boiled Los Angeles writer who once seemed like one of the city’s bright new lights, just gets murkier and more confusing the closer you look.” It remains elusive even as champions of the novelist, who used the pen name Mercedes Lambert and died in 2003, ensure that her work gets another chance at the spotlight. “‘She wrote mystery novels,’ said Michael Connelly, who never knew Munson but called her first novel, ‘El Niño,’ … a major influence on his work. ‘But she was probably the biggest mystery of all.'”
At One-Artist Museums, Context Is Key To Success
“Leaders of one-artist museums across the country — including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont. — spend their days dreaming up ways to promote the legacies of individual artists. Instead of creating a shrine or a morgue, directors of these museums try to position the artist as the center of a universe that reaches out to scholars, artists and the public.” And the number of such museums has grown in the U.S. in recent years.
Anglican Hymnals To Include Reggae Songs
“Songs by late reggae legends Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, both devout Rastafarians, will be included in a new collection of Anglican church hymnals in Jamaica. Marley’s ‘One Love’ and Tosh’s ‘Psalm 27’ will be the first reggae tunes to appear in songbooks alongside traditional worship music on the island that gave birth to reggae, said church leaders preparing a new collection of hymns.”
Bergman? Antonioni? Never Heard Of ‘Em.
The deaths last week of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni highlighted their irrelevance — a marginalization due not only to the passage of time, Ty Burr argues, but to the way we watch movies. “If you wanted to see an old movie three decades ago — and you were lucky enough to live in a big city — you went to a revival theater and joined the worshipers at the altar. … What was once a vibrant communal experience has become a solitary pursuit. As with so many other things in the 21st century, movie history is a Balkanized casualty of an attention-deficit culture.”
A Violin Star, Unrecorded And Unremembered
“Composers of any era can be immortalized through their scores, but posterity is not as kind to performers who lived before the advent of recordings. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim was arguably the most important fiddle player of the 19th century, and Aug. 15 will mark the 100th anniversary of his death. But don’t worry if you’ve made other plans and can’t attend the centenary tributes. There are virtually none, at least not in this country. Almost no one seems to have remembered.”
Save The Celebrity Interview. No, Seriously.
“Beyond all the cliches about duels and dances and dates, celebrity interviews are essentially collaborative performances, carefully crafted and staged to deliver a flawless portrayal of false intimacy. They are the secular confessional, the tutorials in morality (or at least manners), the chance to occupy the same normative grid that governs everyone in the world, even its best woman. Executed well, the Celebrity Interview is the very Platonic ideal of public privacy. It may be a bankrupted form, but it’s still worth saving.”
Would Erasing Bolshoi Blackface Harm “La Bayadère”?
“The Bolshoi may have toned down the black face paint for what can only be described as the ‘golliwog’ dancers in its current staging of La Bayadère, but is it time to get rid of them entirely? For those who haven’t seen or have blanked all memory of these exotic cuties, they are the eight little girls who are deployed as ‘native’ fan bearers in the first two acts of the ballet, and who are periodically let loose in capering, flat-footed dances that barely stop short of them scratching under their armpits. … If we find them difficult to stomach, however, what do we want to happen?”
Elton John: The Internet Is Killing Art. Shut It Down.
“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff,” Sir Elton says. “Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. It’s just a means to an end.”
Off-B’way, Signature Quietly Changes Playwrights’ Lives
“Playwrights who dedicate themselves to working in the American theater can look forward to lives of lonely scribbling, mystified condescension and relative penury…. As their careers lengthen, they can expect our culture’s congenital amnesia to enshroud them, either in the mantle of the one play that made their name or in the outer realms of utter obscurity. And then James Houghton might give them a call. ‘I think every single playwright in this city, maybe the country, is wondering when and if it’s gonna happen,’ said Tony Kushner….”