“The more than £100 million of extra public cash that has been invested by the government in English theatre since 2002 has resulted in a ‘confident and energised’ sector, creating ‘innovative’ and ‘risk-taking’ work with higher production values, while employing more staff and paying better wages, but has failed to increase audience numbers across the country.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Like A Lower East Side Gallery Transplanted Into A Treehouse’: NY State’s Wassaic Project
“A rare survivor among the stately wood-crib elevators that once towered over rural America, this 105-foot-tall structure has been reincarnated as one of the strangest new homes for contemporary art in the Northeast.”
Louisiana Parish Sues Architect Of Unfinished Arts Center
“With construction of the performing arts center [in Metairie, near New Orleans] … running a year behind schedule and $10 million over budget, Jefferson Parish has sued the project’s original architect, alleging that numerous fundamental flaws in the design are the source of the complications and costs.”
Longtime Broadway Composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) Moves Into Opera
The Grammy- and Oscar-winning songwriter behind the musicals Wicked, Pippin and Godspell is working on “his first opera, intriguingly titled Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which will have its world premiere Sept. 26 at the Granada in Santa Barbara. … Schwartz wrote both the music and libretto for Seance, a psychological thriller about a medium, her husband and the spirit of their deceased 11-year-old son.”
Keeping A Cool Head: Ice Age May Have Sped Development Of The Human Brain
“Some 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors’ brains expanded from a mere 600 cubic centimetres to about a litre. Two new studies suggest it is no fluke that this brain boom coincided with the onset of an ice age. Cooler heads, it seems, allowed ancient human brains to let off steam and grow. For all its advantages, the modern human brain is a huge energy glutton … [and] would have generated heat faster than it could dissipate it in the warmer climate of earlier times.”
Moviegoers, All Blinking At Once
“Worried you’ll blink and miss a crucial piece of the action? Then you can relax. While watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important. And because we tend to watch films in a similar way, moviegoers often blink in unison, researchers find.”
Maybe Computers Could Conquer Us All
“An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.”
LACMA Ends Its Film Programming
“For four decades, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has fed film aficionados a steady diet of movie classics – retrospectives that included works from Roman Polanski, Cary Grant, Ernst Lubitsch and, in a current series, James Mason. But the museum’s weekend film program was losing both money and its audience, and LACMA said Tuesday that it was pulling the plug on its cinematic centerpiece.”
Why Music Mags Are Doomed
“I’m going to leave aside the question of whether Blender and Vibe somehow deserved their undoing, via editorial missteps or poor business-side decisions, and whether Rolling Stone and Spin deserve their present difficulties. Criticisms attach to every title, and while such factors play a part in the music-mag death march, they’re negligible when considered alongside three bigger problems that cut deep and wide across the medium.”
Wicked, War Of The Roses Sweep Australia’s Helpmann Awards
“Two blockbusters dominated the Helpmann Awards presented at Sydney’s Opera House last night. The Broadway hit musical Wicked and the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, the eight-hour War of the Roses, both won six awards.”