“The policy shift, enacted in June but largely unnoticed outside Italy, reflects growing concerns by Sicilian officials that their most important treasures are too often out of the country, while their own museums suffer.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Struggle Facing Broadway’s Latest Terrific Musical
‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder opened last week to some of the best reviews of the fall, but now comes the hard part: increasing its ticket sales. [The show] lacks big-name stars and songwriters who can generate buzz, and it isn’t adapted from a popular film with a built-in fan base like many modern Broadway musicals.”
Ian McKellen Says This Is Probably His Last Broadway Outing
The 74-year-old actor, currently appearing alongside Patrick Stewart in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s No Man’s Land, says that he “night as well go out with a bang.”
Berlin’s Rival Opera Houses Are, At Last, Getting Along Famously
Nearly a decade after the Deutsche Oper and the Staasoper faced a sever cash crunch and a possible merger, “while rivalry between the two institutions has not completely subsided, recent changes suggest a new era of high ambition and close cooperation.”
Meet The Woman Who Knew Mahler And Kafka
Alex Ross recounts a visit with 110-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer, a former pianist who is the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, who met Gustav Mahler as a child, and who played Beethoven for Franz Kafka after a family Seder.
Race And Gender In Angry Birds
(Yes, you read that headline correctly.)
Backstage At The Old Vic’s Create-Six-Plays-In-24-Hours Festival
The director of the project announces to the assembled artists, “The writers will begin writing at midnight, and will have roughly six hours to make a play about 10 to 15 minutes long, each with about four actors. They then go to bed and you guys come back in the morning. You rehearse from about nine to seven – and then we open the house to 1,000 people.”
Why Some People Find Video Games Where You Shoot At People So Addictive
Psychologists believe that the games collectively called “first-person shooters” – Call of Duty, Battlefield, Doom and the like – induce in players (strange as this might seem to anti-violence folks) that state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.
Ousted Bolshoi Star Nikolai Tsiskaridze Testifies In Acid Attack Trial
The popular and outspoken dancer “told a packed Moscow courtroom that [Bolshoi Ballet director and acid attack victim Sergei] Filin had created an unhealthy atmosphere at the historic establishment by picking favourites and demoting others out of personal spite. He accused Filin of being known as ‘a poser and a hysteric’ … [who] always insulted people and yelled at everyone.”
Forbes Magazines “Seven Things The Ballet Can Teach Us About Work”
Donna Sapolin explains, in business-magazine style, why “ballet is a microcosm of successful approaches to work.”