“Barry Jenkins is compact, bald, bespectacled and bookishly handsome. Tarell Alvin McCraney is much taller, with an immaculately groomed beard and stylish green Adidas sneakers … Mr. Jenkins is straight; Mr. McCraney said he considers himself ‘gay-identified.’ Yet their childhood experiences were so similar, their lives so parallel, that you could mix up many facts of their biographies and they’d still be true.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Story Of Broadway’s Favorite Prop Baby Doll, Passed From Show To Show For Years
Twan Baker – “an 18-inch-long, 10-pound (just a guess) blue-eyed doll with an alert expression” who has appeared in at least five Broadway shows and two “Encores!” productions as well as plays and musicals as far afield as Kansas City and Vermont – was born in the prop shop of Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, where the prop master figured out the secret that makes actors want to work with Twan.
How An Asian-American Director Tried To Save ‘The Mikado’ From Its Own Stereotypes
“As [Kelvin Moon] Loh sees it, the new show preserves the integrity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s composition while stripping away the irrelevant junk that has crept into productions over the years. … There are no taped-back slant eyes or faux-hawkish Samurai hairlines, just stage makeup and severe Victorian middle-parts.” The key device is a newly-created prologue featuring Gilbert, Sullivan, and producer Richard D’Oyly-Carte themselves.
Don’t Go Ahead With Sydney Opera House Upgrade, Warns Architect
“Andrew Andersons wrote to Opera House management in October to urge it to relinquish its architecture-by-committee approach and appoint a single firm to oversee upgrades and to rethink its plan for disabled ¬access elevators that would cut a hole in the unique stairs designed by Jørn Utzon.”
New Film Features A Marine Le Pen Character, And France’s Front National Flips Out Over Trailer
“Chez Nous (AKA This Is Our Land) stars Émilie Duquenne as a nurse who becomes a political success in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region after becoming involved with the Patriotic Bloc, a thinly disguised fictional version of the Front National. … The trailer briefly features a character apparently modelled on Le Pen, played by veteran performer Cathérine Jacob.” The movie doesn’t open for another seven weeks, but already party leaders are using words like “scandalous.”
The First Author In History We Know By Name Was A Woman
The 23rd-century-BCE Sumerian priestess and poet Enheduanna wrote hymns whose influence, in terms of form and subject, stretched all the way to the Hebrews, the Greeks, and even early Christians.
Book Prizes Are Harming New Fiction, Warns Agent
“Cutting-edge British literary fiction risks being undermined by its growing reliance on a handful of powerful book prizes, a leading literary agent has warned. But the associated costs of entering the biggest awards mean independent publishers willing to take risks on ‘difficult’ works without obvious marketing potential are being shut out of contention.”
They Fired The Sugar Plum Fairy (That’s Philly For Ya)
Yeah, it’s the city that throws garbage at their own team as well as at the opponents, that has a courtroom and jail in the sports stadium, that beat up a sidewalk Santa (okay, okay, that was a generation ago), that decapitated a friendly hitchhiking robot. In Philadelphia last week, Pennsylvania Ballet told a principal, about an hour before she went onstage, that this would be her last season there because she’s just too tall. (It’s a tough town.)
At Last, David Hallberg Is Back At ABT
“David Hallberg, the American Ballet Theater principal dancer, who has been sidelined by injury for the last two and a half years, is returning to the company and planning to perform during its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House.”
Broadway Just Had The Biggest Box-Office Week In Its History
“Boosted by premium ticket prices, a crowd of tourists, a favorable calendar, some extra scheduled performances, and relatively good weather, … the 33 Broadway shows took in $49,677,279 … for the week ending January 1.”