That would be Adam Cooper, who left a thriving career at the Royal Ballet to play a leather-clad stranger and a ferocious male swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake – then went on to co-found the popular/populist Ballet Boyz, appear as grown Billy in Billy Elliott, and be a high-art heartthrob. About that sex symbol nusiness, he says, “It’s an act, isn’t it?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Post-Modern Monty Python? The Mighty Boosh: Britain’s Latest Cult Comedy Export
“Comedy is always tough to explain, but the magic of the Mighty Boosh is particularly elusive. The show’s opening sequence calls it a ‘”journey through time and space,’ but it’s more like a fantastical children’s show for pop culturally overloaded adult brains, a mash-up of fairy-tale plots, surreal humor, nimble dialogue, twisted musical numbers and homespun visuals and animation.”
Russians Argue That The West Is Out To Destroy Their Past
“President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly ‘severe, evil, and aggressive’. … Many Russians agree with their president.” The most sensitive issue, it seems, is World War II.
Michael Steinberg, 80, Revered Concert Program Annotator And Lecturer
Mark Swed: “I have many times quoted from the program notes of Michael Steinberg, and I expect I will do so many more times. They include some of the finest writing on music that I know. … Not only writers came under the spell of his words, and of the man, but also musicians, composers and administrators. And, most important of all, audiences.”
Munich Phil Declines To Renew Thielemann’s Contract
“Christian Thielemann, chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic since 2004, will not have his contract renewed when it expires in 2011. … The sticking point was a clause which gave the orchestra’s general director, Paul Mueller, the final say in the choice of guest conductors and repertoire over Thielemann.”
Rockefeller Center Murals Get A Sistine Chapel-Style Cleaning
“[At the] lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, that movie-set-perfect Art Deco interior, … for the last nine months a team of six conservators has all but moved in and will be there for the next two years. Carefully concealed behind giant scrims, they spend hour after hour methodically removing decades of yellowed varnish from the building’s famed murals, one inch at a time.”
Can One Create ‘An Authentically Elizabethan Theatrical Experience’ In Modern-Day America?
The theatre company at Shakespeare’s Globe in London means to find out: this fall the group will perform Love’s Labors Lost at eight U.S. universities. “The lights will remain on in the theater, to try to mimic the outdoor feel of the Globe, and characters will talk directly to audience members (or look at them as they talk to other characters).”
Read It And Weep, Tiny Tim: Ukeleles Enjoy An Online Boom
“From YouTube to manufacturers’ websites, from bulletin boards to iPhone and BlackBerry applications that mimic ukes and teach chords, the Internet has been stoking the craze for nearly two years and unveiling fresh talent. ‘The number of new players keeps going up,’ said Mike DaSilva of Berkeley, who ditched a 20-year software career to make ukuleles.”
The ‘Invisible Library’: Books-Within-Books
“Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. … A few deft lines can conjure perfect examples of untutored rawness (Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit, has a manuscript entitled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! … [etc.]“), sublime dullness (“The Purpose of Clothing Is to Keep Us Warm,” in Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s Chronicles of Bustos Domecq) or anything in between. Why write the whole book when you can get so much mileage out of the title alone?”
Why Can’t The Movies Get Stand-Up Comedy Right?
“There have been some well-received documentaries on the subject (Comedian, The Aristocrats) and some memorable performance films. But the consensus in the comedy world is that … [e]ven the better movies on the subject – including those made by star-directors who should know better, like Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal – are full of tired showbiz clichés and central characters who are stereotypically unhappy, insecure, neurotic or even … downright certifiable.”