“This year’s Richard Tucker award – often called the ‘Heisman Trophy of opera’ – goes to mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. … Each year the nonprofit Richard Tucker Music Foundation awards the prize – plus $30,000 – to ‘an American singer poised on the edge of a major national and international career’.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Peter Brook On His Pathbreaking Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Then, the first visit to Europe of the Peking Circus revealed that in the lightness and speed of anonymous bodies performing astonishing acrobatics without exhibitionism, it was pure spirit that appeared. This was a pointer to go beyond illustration to evocation.”
Russell Brand’s Tribute To Margaret Thatcher
The British comedian’s encomium to the late prime minister has received lots of attention – for its thoughtfulness and a measure of grudging respect along with the criticism you’d expect from Brand.
Theatre As Community-Based Development In Rural India
“Rather than arriving with a paternalist message to preach,” Community-Based Theatre “invites villages to determine what their primary problem is, and then to write and perform a play that illustrates it. … ‘It is not about the problems of the NGOs. People are working for their own rights, in their own way’.”
Dancing About Neurology: Bill T. Jones Does Oliver Sacks
Jones’s New York Live Arts is presenting a festival of works inspired by Sacks’s books and case studies. As the doctor says, “Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.”
Jon Stewart Catches On In China
“Jon Stewart has decided, as he put it this week, that he might be working the wrong continent. In a segment called ‘Big Ratings in Giant China,’ Stewart expounded on his recent discovery that he is racking up millions of hits, and thousands of favorable comments, from Chinese viewers, who see the show in scattered subtitled clips posted on Chinese sites.”
High Camp Is A Serious Matter
As Christopher Isherwood put it: “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.” J. Bryan Lowder’s case-in-point: Savannah’s own Lady Chablis.
Kiev Ballet Fires Director, Claiming It Never Actually Hired Him
“The Ukraine National Opera house was embroiled in a farcical scandal Thursday after it ousted a star dancer” – Denis Matviyenko – “from the post of ballet company chief on the grounds he never formally held the job.”
Django Unchained Banned In China At Last Possible Second
“Just a few minutes after the lights dimmed and the credits rolled, Chinese censors on Thursday yanked Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained from cinemas around the country.”
Alarm Over Conversion Of Historic Church To Mosque In Turkey
“One of the most important monuments of late Byzantium, the 13th-century Church of Hagia Sophia in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, which is now a museum, will be converted into a mosque, after a legal battle that has dramatic implications for other major historical sites in Turkey.”