“David King, 56, received a call from Beijing hours after the £27m spectacular was watched by a global TV audience of over a billion. Contacts in the Chinese capital – where he already stages a hugely successful annual Christmas show – have asked him to bring a new Olympics-style musical by the end of the year.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Tehran’s Modern Art Museum Could Be A Stunner – If They’d Just Display The Art
The last Shah assembled a major collection – Cassatt and Degas and Magritte, Pollock and Lichtenstein and Warhol, even Picasso – and it all got stuck in a basement in the early days of the Islamic Republic. Three decades on, asks Jonathan Jones, why shouldn’t this mother lode be gracing the walls of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
Toddlers Just Want To Be Helpful (Really?)
“‘From an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others,’ concludes a research team led by Robert Hepach … [He] and his colleagues argue that before they are socialized into selfishness, children are intrinsically motivated to help others – and not because they wish to ‘take credit’ for their beneficence.”
Mashing Up Shakespeare And Brecht In An Airplane Hangar
For Britain’s ongoing World Shakespeare Festival, National Theatre Wales has set itself up in a former RAF base for a production called Coriolan/us – “an ‘infusion’ of Shakespeare’s study of political and military might with Bertolt Brecht’s Coriolan, his unfinished, heavily leftwing attempt to update the play; translated excerpts will be layered with Shakespeare’s script.”
Ballet San Antonio Begins Hiring Back Its Dancers
“Ballet San Antonio, which took some cost-cutting measures earlier this year to manage its debt, is rebounding, adding two artists to its staff and rehiring many of the dancers who were let go a few months ago.”
France’s Unemployment Scheme For Artists Unsustainable, Says Audit
“Known as the intermittents du spectacle system, it has sparked the French arts world’s biggest strikes and most flamboyant street demonstrations whenever a government has sought to scale it down. … Currently 100,000 creative workers benefit from the special unemployment system, but it is running at a huge deficit of around €1bn.”
WGBH Boston Buys Public Radio International
“The Boston station said Thursday that it has acquired Public Radio International, the Minneapolis company that distributes some of the best-known public radio programs, including This American Life, to nearly 900 affiliates across the country and on satellite radio, reaching more than 16 million listeners.”
It’s Official: Philadelphia Orchestra Is Out Of Bankruptcy
A federal judge “approved the association’s reorganization plan June 28, but with the writing of checks and completion of other administrative matters Monday and Tuesday, the curtain officially has come down on perhaps the most perilous episode in the history of the organization that supports and presents the storied ensemble.”
Gore Vidal, 86
“Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. … And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.”
New Yorker To Publish Fitzgerald Story It Rejected In 1936
“The New Yorker this week is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Thanks for the Light,’ that it rejected three-quarters of a century ago. Turning the story down in 1936, the editors said that it was ‘altogether out of the question’ and added, ‘It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.'”