“The first shoe dropped quietly. When New York City Opera announced its new season last month, the name of George Manahan, the company’s music director, was conspicuously absent. The second shoe, now hanging somewhere in midair, will be the elimination of Mr. Manahan’s position.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Can Sacramento Opera Save Itself With A Merger?
“When the Sacramento Opera pulled the plug on the remainder of its 2010-2011 season last December, it was with the awareness that its operating model was unsustainable. This fall the company is making a modest comeback, staking its future on coproduced operas and a possible merger with the Sacramento Philharmonic.”
When An English Director Stages An Arabic Thousand And One Nights
“There came an evening – it was in Kuwait, as Tim Supple recalls – when one of the many people he consulted in his quest to bring One Thousand and One Nights to the stage using a pan-Arabic cast, suddenly got a bit aggressive. ‘You know,’ the man said, ‘at some point someone is going to ask you: what the —- are you doing here?'”
Preserving Rare And Ancient Alphabets In Wood
In his Endangered Alphabets Project, Vermont writer Tim Brookes carves into curly maple samples of the scripts of disappearing languages – Samaritan, Tuareg, Cherokee, and the like.
The Bell Jar At 40: Sylvia Plath’s Young Adult Novel Reaches Middle Age
“It’s always interesting when a very strange book is also an enduringly popular book. … Like The Catcher in the Rye,” The Bell Jar “is a touchstone for a certain kind of introspective, moody teenager – the kind of teenager who used to listen to the Cure and, later on, Tori Amos, and who these days listens to – actually I have no idea, but she definitely has a blog.”
How Oscar Wilde Painted Over Dorian Gray
Alex Ross looks at the various drafts of The Picture Of Dorian Gray and notes how Wilde edged toward – and then away from – unambiguously portraying homosexual desire.
That Rule About Writing What You Know? Don’t Follow It
Bret Anthony Johnston: “To be perfectly clear: I don’t tell students not to ferret through their lives for potential stories. … What I don’t want – and what’s prone to happen when writers set out to write what they know – is for him to think an imagined story is less urgent, less harrowing or authentic, than a true story.”
Why Readers Keep Turning To Thrillers
“Ask yourself this: is anyone, even the grittiest of Scandinavians, ever going to write a thriller about this week’s murders in Norway? Of course not. It would be like a murder mystery set in Auschwitz. Thrillers operate according to a set of rules, if not always to a formula. The reason that we love them is that they are not, fundamentally, going to surprise us.”
Shakespeare Cusses So Much Better Than You And I Do
Rupert Christiansen: “The other day, in search of a quotation, I was leafing through Shakespeare’s Henry V. The character of choleric Ancient Pistol reminded me that the Elizabethans approached cussing much more imaginatively than we do, treating it as an opportunity for elaborate verbal invention rather than just taking potshots at the same flat monosyllables.”
Two New Legal Threats Complicate Philadelphia Orchestra Bankruptcy Proceedings
“The American Federation of Musicians’ pension fund has suggested it could sue members of the orchestra board and outside funders” for $20-30 million if the Orchestra pulls out of the union’s pension plan. And Peter Nero, founder and conductor of the Philly Pops, has threatened to force the Annenberg Foundation’s involvement in his suit over the dissolution of the PhilOrch-Pops merger.