“Opera is the coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing in the greatest synthesis of art capable of collapsing at the beep of a watch alarm. … As the sounds soar and mingle perfectly, the evening makes sense, the stupidity is forgotten and the burglars and the rain and the hundred cars outside and the fight 40 yards across the street, and then someone sneezes, which is when, somewhere in the middle of the second act, in a radical switch to the American midwest, we return to a stage full of big people and papier-mâché cacti.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Lynn Novick Has Been Making Movies With Ken Burns For Decades – Why Is Only One Of Them Famous?
“Burns has long worked with multiple teams; these different squads of writers and producers mean that he can sometimes release as many as two ambitious films in a single year. Among these collaborators, Novick stands out. She is one of the few people who have shared directing credit with Burns more than once, collaborating with him on Frank Lloyd Wright, Prohibition, The Tenth Inning (an update to Baseball), The War, and now The Vietnam War. Novick, not Burns, now conducts most of the interviews for the films they make together. And the movies that result are a product of a unique alchemy: Novick’s penchant for obsessive research blended with Burns’s eye for narrative arc.”
Hollywood Launches Campaign To Press For Investigating Russian Interference In 2016 Election
“Big Hollywood names have helped found the Committee to Investigate Russia, a nonprofit aiming to spread information about Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and create debate about possible threats to the country’s institutions. The committee launched Tuesday in the U.S., with director Rob Reiner on the advisory board and actor Morgan Freeman featured in an introductory video.” (And that video has led to a big anti-Morgan Freeman campaign in Russia.)
‘#StopMorganLie’ – Morgan Freeman Has Become Russia’s New Favorite Piñata
Kyle Swenson reports on “the Russian reaction that greeted a two-minute online video [Freeman] recorded recently for a group hoping to keep alive concerns over Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Freeman is being portrayed as a tool of the U.S. establishment trying to bring down Trump” – and as everything from a silly, high-strung thespian to a marijuana-addled old man to someone with a “Messianic complex.”
A Rediscovered Essay By A Carolina Slave
In the early 19th century, the young George Moses Horton used to create impromptu poems for students at the University of North Carolina. “He also began publishing more serious poems, like ‘On Liberty and Slavery,’ in newspapers, and in 1829 became the first African-American in the South to publish a book. His efforts to gain freedom through his writing failed. But he was able to buy his time from his owner. … And now, from the archives, comes a previously unknown essay by Horton, which sheds oblique but suggestive light on his possible role in campus controversies over race, power and free speech that sound strikingly similar to those raging today.”
Unknown Shostakovich Work Found In Moscow State Archives
“The short work, consisting of title sheet, a single page for the viola part and one for the piano score, is titled Impromptu op.33. It was found among documents belonging to Vadim Borisovsky (d. 1972), the violist of the Beethoven Quartet for over 40 years.”
Can Philly’s Kimmel Center Make Itself Welcoming All The Time And Not Just At Curtain Time?
“When the Kimmel programs the plaza and streetscape, as it does with festivals and summer solstice parties, the vibe is superb. … But when there’s nothing going on there, as is the case many daylight hours during the week, it’s just you, a security guard or two, and the psychic tumbleweeds. To have Center City charged with workers, shoppers, and students as the Kimmel sleeps is an oddly squandered opportunity at a time when the arts are looking for all the friends they can get.”
Guggenheim Pulls Three Works From Show Following Protests (And Some Threats) From Animal-Rights Activists
“The museum, in Manhattan, made the decision after it had come under unrelenting pressure from animal-rights supporters and critics over works in the exhibition, ‘Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World.'” The museum’s statement said, in part, “Although these works have been exhibited in museums in Asia, Europe and the United States, the Guggenheim regrets that explicit and repeated threats of violence have made our decision necessary.”
Houston Grand Opera, Like So Many Other Houstonians, Takes Refuge From Harvey In Convention Center
With the flood-damaged Wortham Theater Center, HGO’s home, out of commission until at least next May, the company has decided to set up a flexible 1,700-seat performance space – dubbed the “HGO Resilience Theater” – in Exhibition Hall A3 at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
The BBC’s Drama Programming Is Built On The Back Of Theatre, So It Should Damn Well Provide Decent Theatre Coverage
Lyn Gardner: “At a time when newspapers are facing financial disaster and theatre coverage is one of the first casualties, the BBC should step up to the plate in a way it has neglected in the past. … If Radio 5 Live can have sports news every half-hour, why can’t it have a few minutes of arts news too? Just as many people would be interested to know about the casting of Follies or National Theatre Wales’ plans to make a show about the NHS as would want to know who is in the England cricket team.”