“Theater economics being what they are, actors have grown accustomed to doubling and even tripling up on roles when performing in large-cast plays. But decupling up: playing 10 roles? This is the task facing Eric Tucker on the nights when the Bedlam theater company performs George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Period Is Pissed Off.
“The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce ‘I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.'”
A Yamomami Shaman’s View Of Us
In a new co-written autobiography, Davi Kopenawa, a shaman and spokesman for the indigenous Amazon group discusses his own life and his views about the white outsiders who first attacked and pushed his people, then celebrated them and made them into an international cause.
Ballet’s Top Stars Become Brands In Their Own Right
“A wave of international ballet stars are increasingly leaping from company to company, creating their own brands and becoming more like world-traveling conductors and opera stars. In doing so, they are … changing an art form long defined by national styles that dancers perfected as they grew up with – and stayed loyal to – a single company.”
Russian Ballet Dancers Talk About All The Turmoil
The trial of a Bolshoi soloist for the acid attack on the boss, the sudden installation of a fired Bolshoi principal at the Mariinsky’s historic dance school, accusations of backbiting and bribery … Three of Russia’s top ballet stars (including Nikolai Tsiskaridze, the fired one) speak publicly about the mess.
Creating Costumes, And Then Dancing In Them
When the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Maile Okamura “designs costumes for dance pieces, she doesn’t have to go far to get a performer’s perspective – she’s one herself.”
What Bill Gates Doesn’t Get About Arts Philanthropy
Gates recently told an interviewer that donating money to a museum rather than to the treatment and prevention of blindness was morally equivalent to taking 1% of the visitors to a museum and blinding them. Terry Teachout takes the argument on.
Mandela‘s Long Walk To The Screen
What did it take to get Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom made? “English movie stars and a producer willing to wait out some 30-plus screenplay drafts” – not to mention, of course, the blessing of the man himself.
Watching Nelson Mandela’s Story Unfold From In Front Of The Cameras
“He has been Nelson Mandela’s confidant in prison and his main protector as president. He has watched the liberation leader go from a womanizing gallivant to a statesman who stitched together a torn nation. Tony Kgoroge has seen this history unfold like a movie. Well, actually, two movies.”
Why Should Doris Lessing Have Been All Flustered And Grateful About The Nobel Prize?
“Winning the Nobel Prize was not the most important moment of Doris Lessing’s extraordinary and prolific life, and it seems as though some of her critics won’t forgive her for not pretending that it was, just as they won’t forgive her for leaving her two young children in the care of their father, in Rhodesia, so that she could pursue a different kind of life.”