Lyn Gardner: “Why does it happen at a live show but not at a filmed one? American lyricist Alan Jay Lerner may have been right when he suggested that ‘coughing in the theatre is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.'”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The French Are Not Impressed With Fifty Shades Of Grey
“So as French bookshops prepare to take stock of the British bestseller … or, as it is called in French, Cinquante nuances de Grey … our Gallic cousins would like us to know that they have nothing to learn from us Anglo-Saxons in matters of sadomasochism.”
Duluth Festival Opera To Leave Duluth
“According to Artistic Director Craig Fields, the DFO simply is not receiving the kind of community financial support it needs to survive. … Fields, a resident of the Twin Cities, wants to relocate the company to the metro area with a new board, under a new name.”
UK National Gallery Director Disses Video, Conceptual, And Performance Art
Nicholas Penny: “The art form I don’t relate to – I’d put it more strongly actually – is video because it seems to me so often merely to be an incompetent form of film, made with the excuse that it is untainted by … the entertainment industry. I’m not very impressed by conceptual art nor very often by performance art. I’m uneasy with some aspects of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.”
Maggie Smith Has Had Enough Of Hollywood’s Youth Obsession
She argues that studios treat audiences “as if they were five years old. … It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that’s correct, because there’s an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.”
Maggie Smith Is Wrong – There Are Plenty Of Good Movies For Older Audiences
“Two or three years ago, she would have had an unanswerable case. Now, thanks not least to her own exertions, ‘grey cinema’ is booming, with a string of successful films, many British-made … They have done well because they are well-written, well-acted, do not patronise their audiences and tackle serious themes in an intelligent, nuanced way.”
Judi Dench Will Not Be Retiring
“With her seventh Bond film about to hit the big screen, Judi Dench shows no sign, even at 77, of curbing her enormous drive. She talks about painting landscapes, playing M and why she hates to be alone on stage.”
Olga Smirnova, Rocketing To Ballet Stardom
“She was scouted at her graduation from St. Petersburg’s Vaganova school and coaxed down to Moscow, where she spent exactly one day in the corps de ballet before being offered a series of high-profile solos. … You might think the speed of her ascent would leave Smirnova slightly breathless and giddy, but of course ballerinas are nothing if not poised.”
Seattle Symphony, Opera Musicians Authorize Strike
“After months of contract negotiations with the managements of the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera, the vote is in response to a contract offer Wednesday that called for musicians to take a 15 percent reduction in compensation in the 2012-13 season.”
FBI Arrests Man At Center Of Broadway Rebecca‘s Collapse
“A Long Island stockbroker defrauded the producers of the Broadway musical Rebecca with an elaborate scheme that included a fictitious loan and phantom investors who were conjured up as part of a sham plan to rescue the financially ailing show, federal authorities charged in a criminal complaint Monday.”