“Scandal has rocked a Queens-based arts charity that abruptly shut down on May 11. Healing Arts Initiative (HAI), founded in 1969, offered performances and workshops for the city’s poor, disabled, and elderly, but was brought down by a $750,000 embezzlement scheme that left director D. Alexandra Dyer disfigured after she was attacked with lye while investigating the organization’s finances.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Remember ‘Cop Rock’? It Wasn’t A Disaster, It Was Ahead Of Its Time
The 1990 prime-time series was “a high-profile failure that has become the stuff of television legend. It was an effort to tell a cop-shop story with the tools of a Broadway musical, an idea that generated a smattering of admiration but a whole lot of ridicule that remains to this day.” Yet, argues Neil Genzliger, “what immediately strikes a 2016 viewer is how current the story seems.”
If There’s No Such Thing As Free Will, Should We Just Pretend There Is?
“If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?”
I Read Proust On My Cellphone – And It Was Good
Sarah Boxer: “When I tell people this, they look at me like I have drowned a kitten. … But reading Proust on my cellphone was, I have to say, like no other reading experience I’ve had before or since. It was magical and – dare I say it? – Proustian in a very peculiar way.”
Crystal Pite Choreographs A Meltdown
“‘You’re not stretching your face enough’, explains Crystal Pite, patiently. She demonstrates with a lop-sided grimace that distorts her rather beautiful, open features into a kind of agitated question mark. It’s not the standard rehearsal note from a choreographer to their dancers, but the eight men and women in the studio mimic Pite’s expression as they dance, and an unsettling new energy comes into their bodies. You can feel a shift in the atmosphere of the room.”
BBC To Start Paid Subscription Streaming Service
“BBC plans to launch a homegrown rival to Netflix and Amazon Prime are a step closer to reality after the government gave it the green light to launch a new paid-for subscription service.”
When Advertisers Troll Bigots By Featuring A Gay Or Interracial Family, Everyone Wins
“By now, this is a familiar template: 1. Brand implicitly endorses a mainstream progressive cause. 2. Small band of monsters reacts predictably. 3. Right-thinking Americans rush to embrace and defend the brand. … No matter how the fracas plays out, everybody wins in the end: The trolls get attention, responders get the warm and fuzzy pleasure of combating hate, and the brand comes out looking like a crusader for justice.”
Sofia Coppola Directs Her First Opera – With Valentino As Costume Designer
The production of La traviata at the Rome Opera is still in rehearsals, but it has nearly sold out its 15-performance run – and is, according to the company’s general manager, “already the biggest box office hit in the history of the theater from 1880.”
Ambassador Theatre Group Forces Out Its Founder And CEO
“Howard Panter, a knighted titan of British theater who had been ambitiously leading his company into the American market, is suddenly out as leader of the company that he and his wife founded 24 years ago.”
Milwaukee Art Museum Names New Director
“The Milwaukee Art Museum has hired a new director, Marcelle Polednik, currently the director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville at the University of North Florida.”