This summer the culture minister “accused Amazon of driving prices down in order to raise them once a monopoly had been secured. The concept is so repellent to national sentiment that an English word has been commandeered to describe it: dumping. … As online sales rise, Amazon has come to be seen in France as le mastodonte américain, the mammoth capitalist interloper rumbling across the Atlantic to trample on the delicacies of culture.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Inside The Chorus Line: Meet Some Members Of “The Ensemble”, Broadway’s Backbone
“Thriving at the heart of live theater, the ensemble is a true representation of a team effort. Without it, the show wouldn’t go on. Dance Magazine spoke with Sarrah Strimel, Paloma Garcia-Lee, and Bahiyah Hibah to investigate the crucial work of ensemble women” in Broadway musicals.
Is There Any Kind Of Play Marianne Elliott Can’t Direct Brilliantly?
We may know her best for War Horse, but Michael Mopurgo selected her to direct the staging of his book after seeing her production of Shaw’s Saint Joan. She directed Kim Cattrall in Sweet Bird of Youth for Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic, and her National Theatre staging of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seven Olivier Awards.
Qatar Gets Quite An Eyeful Of Damien Hirst
The very prosperous, very conservative country’s capital has acquired some public art that might be seen as provocative almost anywhere. “Called The Miraculous Journey, it consists of 14 monumental bronze sculptures … chronicling the gestation of a fetus inside a uterus, from conception to birth, ending with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy.”
Have A Look At The World’s Coolest Currency Notes
You think the U.S. Mint’s new $100 bill is impressive? “Perhaps nothing that rolls out of our ATMs will ever compete with the patriotic phantasmagoria of Kazakhstan’s currency, which looks like what would happen if you gave Robert Rauschenberg the keys to the Office of Printing and Engraving.”
New York City Ballet Star Breaks Foot Onstage
“The New York City Ballet’s principal dancer Chase Finlay is not expected back onstage until the winter season after breaking his foot during a performance of Swan Lake, said a company spokeswoman.”
U.S. Supreme Court To Hear Raging Bull Copyright Case
“Paula Petrella, daughter of the deceased screenwriter Frank Petrella … says MGM Holdings Inc and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment have infringed the copyright of a 1963 screenplay upon which she alleges 1980 movie was based.” The legal issue is “in what circumstances a defendant in a copyright case can win based on the failure of the plaintiff to assert his or her claim at an earlier stage.”
Normal Rockwell Painting Worth $1M Is Missing
“A Norman Rockwell painting that sold for more than $1 million at an auction in May disappeared from a storage warehouse in Queens last month.” The painting, titled Sport and made for a Saturday Evening Post cover, depicts a fisherman in the rain.
Is Theatre Criticism Really In Crisis? Not Necessarily
Despite the shrinking word counts and business-model problems, writes Lyn Gardner, “the pendulum may yet swing the other way. There was a time back in the early 1990s when newspapers barely went near regional theatres; now they wouldn’t dream of not reviewing the latest show at West Yorkshire Playhouse.”
American Theaters Are Finally Coming Around To Hearing Loops
The technology, which magnetically transfers the sounds picked up by a microphone and transmitter to a special coil in a hearing aid or cochlear implant, has been used widely in Europe for years. Now a critical mass of venues in the U.S. are coming around to installing the equipment.