Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now nearing the end of its national tour, always works in local references. Erik Piepenburg finds out how those references get chosen and offers a few choice examples.
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Big Data Is Replacing Execs’ Taste And Intuition At The Center Of The Music Biz
“Whereas in the past, the industry relied primarily on sales and how often a songs were played on the radio, they can now see what specific songs people are listening to, where they are hearing it and how they are consuming it.”
Devastation, Triumph, And A Naked Guy With A Boa Constrictor: Steven Lavine Remembers His 29 Years As President Of CalArts
“In this edited oral history, he reminisces how he battled deficits, rebuilt a shaken campus, opened a downtown performance outpost and contended with the student who showed up at graduation wearing nothing but a snake.”
‘Testosterone Rex’ – There’s Some Serious Hidden Sexism In The Ways We Think About Risk-Taking
“Testosterone Rex” is historian of science Cordelia Fine’s term for “the idea that women are driven by biology and evolution to be cautious, and men to be daring.” Fine argues that this idea is way too simplistic (unsurprising) but still undergirds way too much social science (surprising, but perhaps not to female social scientists).
Opera And Broadway Have A Fruitful Relationship – If Only More Opera Fans Understood That, Says Anne Midgette
“It seems arbitrary to assert that Broadway musicals exist in a separate category from an art form that happily embraces popular forms such as opéra comique, Singspiel and operetta (all of which involve spoken dialogue interspersed with sung numbers). Those opera lovers who profess to look down on musicals act as though the genre were best represented by Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.”
Why Are So Many Americans So Hostile To Government Funding Of The Arts?
In most wealthy countries, the idea of completely abolishing the equivalents of the NEA and NEH would be politically poisonous if not unthinkable; in the United States, there have been factions calling for those agencies to ve terminated for pretty much their entire existence. Why is the U.S. such an outlier on this issue? Josephine Livingstone argues that the reasons lie deep in the nation’s history.
How David Hallberg Got His Dancing Mojo Back
In 2014, he was a genuine ballet celebrity, admired enough to become the first American ever invited to become a principal at the Bolshoi Ballet. Then he suffered a complex ankle injury, and a year later, he was ready to give up dancing entirely. (And he was already getting offers to direct companies.) But ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie convinced him not to abandon the stage just yet. Candice Thompson has the story of how Hallberg struggled through a surprisingly difficult recovery, reworked his technique and returned to performing.
Unknown Sylvia Plath Poems Discovered In Old Carbon Paper
Talk about unlikely places! “Written at the start of Plath and [Ted] Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain.”
Bette Midler May Not Be Singing At The Tonys: Report
Not having the biggest star from the season’s biggest musical appear on the show that’s Broadway’s biggest chance to market itself to America – well, that could be a problem. But it looks like that’s what will happen, thanks to an “an impasse [in negotiations] over the conditions under which Ms. Midler would sing.”
Meet Christopher Wheeldon’s Right-Hand Man
“While still in the corps of New York City Ballet, Jason Fowler was drawn to the role of répétiteur. … So it comes as little surprise that 20 years later, Fowler is a primary stager of Christopher Wheeldon’s ballets around the globe.”