Kirk Maynard’s puppets, “including a bucktoothed squirrel, a lime-green lawyer and an obese man with a removable beard, … are covering one of the biggest corruption trials in Ohio history – delivering their reports of real testimony and wiretapped conversations from a yearslong investigation of Jimmy Dimora, [a] Democratic kingpin.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Hawaii Gets Its Orchestra Back At Last
Roughly two years after the Honolulu Symphony’s painful, ignominious collapse, professional-level orchestral music returns to the islands as the newly-constituted Hawaii Symphony gives its first performance this weekend in Honolulu.
L.A.’s Elephant Theatre Company, Short of Money, Goes On Hiatus
“The Elephant Theatre Company – one of the most recognizable names in Hollywood’s Theatre Row district – has suspended operations for the 2012 season due largely to financial difficulties and will undergo an internal reorganization, … Founded in the mid-’90s, the Elephant specializes in new American plays, often with edgy themes.”
Sondheim Is Writing A New Musical
“The composer Stephen Sondheim revealed on Wednesday that he is currently hard at work on a new musical and that it will be a collaboration with the playwright David Ives. … No further details were given.”
Qatar Becomes Major Player In World Art Market
“Qatari buyers make up to 25 percent of the Middle East’s $11 billion art market … The emirate itself was the world’s biggest buyer in the art market by value last year,” paying fearsomely high prices for works by the likes of Cézanne and Rothko to adorn its glittering new museums.
Yet Qatar’s Free-Spending Royals May Be Stifling Local Artists
“Critics of the Qatar royal family say it is behaving as a facilitator of the international art scene while at the same time using it for self-promotion. And rather than letting the art scene in Qatar grow naturally according to the needs of its people to express themselves, these observers say, the country is handpicking artists who are politically neutral. In such an atmosphere, most local artists do not stand much of a chance.”
Philadelphia Orchestra Keeps Its CEO (For Three Years This Time)
After a series of contract extensions that covered a few weeks at a time, “the Philadelphia Orchestra Association has signed president and chief executive officer Allison B. Vulgamore for three more years.”
Modern Dance Comes Into Its Own In China
The art form is finally finding its footing “after years of lagging behind other theatrical arts in performance opportunities, funding, media coverage and audience. … Most remarkable of all, in a Chinese context, is that many of these companies are privately run, self-supporting, unregistered – and fiercely independent.”
Japan’s Leftist Revolutionary Filmmaker Is Now An Eminence Grise
Masao Adachi was part of two underground movements in 1960s Japan: avant-garde film and leftist protest. (He later joined the Japanese Red Army.) “Now 72, Mr. Adachi is the focus of renewed interest: part exemplar and part cautionary tale, a figure who lived out the dilemma of merging art and politics more fully and messily than just about any of his radicalized peers.”
A Non-Film By An Iranian Filmmaker Forbidden To Make Films
“In the middle of acting out the screenplay of a film” – titled This Is Not a Film – “he isn’t allowed to make, using strips of tape and a cellphone and his living-room carpet as his only props and sets, Iranian director Jafar Panahi grows discouraged.”