“Salt Lake City’s theater community first reacted with caution at news of … [the] proposed 2,500-seat ‘Broadway-style’ theater, slated for construction [downtown]. Now that the $110 million Utah Performing Arts Center seems increasingly likely to become reality, that same community wants to ensure there might be something in it for cash-strapped local producers, actors, directors and playwrights.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Holiday Shows Lead Resurgence For Boston-Area Arts Orgs
Says one arts exec, “Just three, four years ago, everybody was in the dire crisis. It was about surviving. To think that after that dark time, that we’re in the healthiest place we’ve been arguably in the last few decades, that’s an incredible statement considering what the whole nation’s been through.”
Has Jazz Mummified Itself Within The Great American Songbook?
“[The] jazz fraternity seems to know two things: Despite continued artistic quality, the audience around the music is dying. And the choice of what songs jazz musicians play – and what they don’t play – may be part of the problem.”
American Fiction Is Losing Its Faith
“But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called ‘Christian convictions,’ their would-be successors are thin on the ground.”
A Christmas Sermon, Courtesy Of Dostoevsky
Philosopher Simon Critchley looks at “the meaning of faith, freedom, happiness and the diabolic satisfaction of our desires” as laid out by The Brothers Karamazov‘s Grand Inquisitor.
How Ballet And Video Games Are Alike
“Ballet is, in the words of Homans, ‘full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement.’ And so are games. Ballet straddles the world of music, literature, art and performance. And so do games. And much like the way video games have struggled to separate themselves from sports, board games and toys, early ballet struggled to separate itself from music; dance was not seen as a distinct art form.”
Person Tweeting As Philip Roth Is Not Philip Roth
“‘No, that is not Mr. Roth posting on Twitter,’ a press representative for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes Mr. Roth’s books, said in an e-mail on Wednesday. The Twitter account, @PhilipRothOffic, published its first post on Monday, which read: ‘I join Twitter today. It’s easy …”
Critic Defends ‘Corpsing’ (Dissolving Into Helpless Laughter) Onstage
It’s Lyn Gardner. But relax, she’s talking about Christmas pantomimes, not King Lear.
Kraftwerk Wins Anti-Sampling Ruling In Germany After 12-Year Case
“The question at the heart of the case is how far sampling the work of other artists – a mainstay of modern hip-hop and techno – is permissible when creating new music. The answer given by the Supreme Court is that it is only permissible if the same effect could not have been produced by the new artist himself.”
Emma Thompson Wins Copyright Lawsuit Over Effie
Screenwriter and Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson has prevailed in a lawsuit against another writer who penned a script about a love triangle involving art critic John Ruskin, his teenage wife Effie Gray and pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Thanks to a ruling Tuesday, Thompson can release her film, Effie.”