“The frenetic, high-drama preview promises sweeping shots of Jay Gatsby’s West Egg soirées, immaculate set design, and period-perfect costumes – but also what appears to be a hyper-stylized, extended-music-video treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic,” set to Kanye West and Jay-Z.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Gertrude Stein’s Alphabet Book
“Z is a nice letter, and I am glad it is not Y, I do not care for Y, why, well there is the reason why, I do not care for Y, but Z is a nice letter. I like Z because it is not real it just is not real and so it is a nice letter to you and nice to me, you will see.”
Author Of An Officer And A Gentleman Musical Smacks Back At Show’s Harshest Review
Douglas Day Stewart, screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film and co-writer of the stage show: “After four decades in this business I can tell you this was not a review by any standards. It was an ‘execution’ by someone clearly unable to feel human emotion, or to put it in a kinder way, by someone whose highbrow tastes do not represent you.”
Art Thieves In Detroit Make Off With Warhol, Beuys, Larry Rivers
“The FBI says that sometime between April 27-29, an Andy Warhol silk screen used to produce Flowers and 18 works by other artists were stolen from a business in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.” The collection “includes drawings, prints and paintings by artists such as Larry Rivers, Francesco Clemente, Philip Taaffe, Peter Schuyff and Joseph Beuys.”
Philadelphia Orchestra Submits Reorganization Plan To Bankruptcy Court
“Thirteen months after entering Chapter 11, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association Wednesday night filed its plan for exiting bankruptcy. With consent – sometimes hard-won – now in place from key creditors, the orchestra’s blueprint for recovery will be considered by U.S. Bankruptcy Court.” If the plan is approved, “the orchestra expects to be out of bankruptcy by July 31.”
A Literary Renaissance In Tiny Montenegro
“Six years after independence the country is seeing what [one academic observer] calls ‘a new wave’ of Montenegrin writers. Only a handful have really come to the fore internationally. But as the country is so small, he says, this is the ‘equivalent of 30 or 50 in the UK. It is very significant. There is something going on.'”
Kander Has A New Partner, Eight Years After Ebb’s Death
Kander and Ebb were the legendary team who created Cabaret, Chicago and well over a dozen other musicals over five decades. Fred Ebb died in 2004, but composer John Kander, now 85, has a new lyricist partner: Greg Pierce, 34, “more earnest and less deadpan than Ebb, but just as determined and, lately, just as busy.”
The Market Cost Of Being A Female Artist
“[The] proceeds on all the works by women artists in [this month’s enormous] Christie’s sale tallied up to a mere $17m – less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.” Things are slowly getting better, however.
Asking The Right Questions Makes All The Difference – So How Do We Find The Right Questions?
Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute “are among a handful of thinkers making a career of taking a close look at how questions work, what our brains are doing when they put a question together, and how questions could drive learning, child development, innovation, business strategy, and creativity.”
Hollywood Finds, To Its Surprise, That Films About Older People Put Older People’s Butts In Seats
“Anytime a film costs $10 million to make and ticket sales approach $100 million, Hollywood pays attention. But jaws really drop when a movie starring actors in their 70s and aimed at people over 50 pulls off that trick. Wait. Stop. Older people will go to the movies if we give them something to watch besides superheroes and special effects?”