“One of the Edinburgh Fringe’s leading venue operators, Remarkable Arts, is being wound up, owing tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid box office receipts to companies who staged work at its two theatres during this summer’s festival.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Tony Kushner Gives $100K To CUNY Despite Honorary Degree Flap
Remember last spring when the City University of New York blocked (until getting shamed into backing down) the honoring of Kushner, after a board member claimed the playwright was “anti-Israel”? Well, Kushner is letting bygones be bygones, donating the prize money from his Creative Citizenship award to CUNY.
Long Beach Opera’s Innovative Director To Head Chicago Opera Theater
“Taking the helm of Chicago’s second opera company will be Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of Long Beach Opera, who has built a following for edgy, risk-taking productions of unusual operas, much as [departing COT director Brian] Dickie has done in Chicago.
Planned Arts Center For New York’s Ground Zero Area In Limbo Yet Again
“The fate of a performing arts center slated to be designed by Frank Gehry for the World Trade Center site is in limbo as its boosters await the creation of a board of directors necessary for $100 million in funding.”
Israeli Dance Company Leads In Fight Against Bossy Ultra-Orthodox
The Kolben Dance Company’s Jerusalem studio has big plate-glass windows. The shades on those windows had been drawn for three years, due to threats of violence from ultra-Orthodox Jews offended by the sight of dancing females. Last month, the shades came up, in a move emblematic of a secular Israeli rebellion against religious coercion by an Orthodox minority.
How A Glass Magnate Traded A 16th-Century Persian Manuscript For A De Kooning
“Two utterly disparate artworks now on view in Manhattan – a centuries-old masterpiece and a modernist grotesque of immense price – are linked by a history that has remained largely in the shadows.”
Dusting Off Edward G. Robinson’s Only Play
“Edward G. Robinson’s professional accomplishments include roles in 100 motion pictures, scores of plays and exactly one writing credit, for Kibitzer. He helped steer that play to critical and commercial success when it ran on Broadway for 120 performances in early 1929.” A New York theater company has unearthed the script and given it public readings.
Composer James Matheson Wins $200K Charles Ives Award
“Composer James Matheson – whose new violin concerto is a co-commission between the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony – is the winner of the Charles Ives Living award, a prize organized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”
Treating Parkinson’s Sufferers At Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance
The renowned dance company’s music-and-movement classes for patients are having a major effect, mitigating the symptoms of the neurological disease.
Neuroaesthetics: Where Art Does – And Doesn’t – Meet Neuroscience
“What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one – not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians – seem to have minded, or even noticed.”