James B. Stewart examines the company’s greatly increased expenses, falling attendance figures, drops in large donations, dissension on the board of directors, and the difficult 2014 labor negotiations (and the disputed financial data tossed around at the time).
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Santiago Calatrava’s Glorious Boondoggle At The World Trade Center May Be His Waterloo
“[He] was commissioned to design an architectural extravagance at ground zero. He succeeded, an accomplishment that threatens to destroy his reputation.”
Michael Graves, 80, Pioneering Postmodern Architect And Designer
“Not many architects can claim to have spearheaded a major design movement. Michael Graves played a prominent role in three.”
If There’s A Crisis At English National Opera, It Certainly Isn’t Artistic
“Let’s be absolutely clear about this … there has been no crisis in ENO’s run of productions over the past year and two months, indeed in the bigger picture of the last 10 years. … So where’s the problem? Clearly, as usual, in the management, not in the artistic team.”
Harper Lee Does Want Second Book Published, Says Alabama State Agency
Joseph Borg, head of the Alabama Securities Commission: “We made a determination that Ms. Lee, based on our interview with her, was aware that her book was going to be published. She wanted it to be published. She made it quite clear she did.”
Marilynne Robinson, Roz Chast Win National Book Critics Circle Awards
Chast, a longtime New Yorker cartoonist, won the autobiography award for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?“. Lila, the final book in Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, took the fiction prize; other winners included John Lahr (for his Tennessee Williams biography), the late critic Ellen Willis, poet Claudia Rankine, and historia of American slavery David Brion Davis.
It’s Time For Straight-To-Audio Books, Says Audible’s CEO
Don Katz: “While performances are being elevated and attuned to this advanced listening experience, why not write to the form in an original way? So it’s not just book authors. TV writers, movie writers, others are flocking in to help us get to the next stage. Which is: What is the, from the ground up, creativity that is right for this emergent private listening aesthetic?”
Rupert Goold Says The American Model Of Creating New Musicals Is Better Than The British One
The English director, “whose production of Made in Dagenham is currently running in the West End, said that, unlike the US, the UK’s musical theatre scene is ‘led by a producing model that is dictated by the size of our theatres’ and added that musicals should originate from writers and composers who have stories they need to tell.”
Here’s What’s Getting Audra McDonald Back On Broadway (Since “‘Night, Mother” Didn’t Work Out)
She’ll be starring in a new musical, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Savion Glover, about the making of the 1921 all-black musical that launched Josephine Baker’s career.
How A Movie About Kremlin Corruption Became A No. 1 Hit in Russia
“It says something about Russia’s messy, fitful return to dictatorship that, in the week after the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the best performing movie in the country, beating out Focus and Cinderella this past weekend, was a thriller whose villain works deep within the Russian government.”