“Matthew Feargrieve, 42, was accused at Westminster Magistrates Court of repeatedly punching Ulrich Engler on the shoulder in the performance of Wagner’s Siegfried at the world-famous [Royal Opera House]. It is understood the dispute began because Mr Engler allegedly grabbed a coat belonging to Mr Feargrieve’s wife from an empty seat and threw it on her lap.” – The Telegraph (UK)
Author: Matthew Westphal
In A Country With Few Public Libraries, Ordinary Citizens Create Their Own
There’s the tuk-tuk bookmobile toodling around Jakarta schools. “There is the Perahu Pustaka, a library boat that sails around West Sulawesi. There are libraries on the back of vegetable carts, shelves lugged around by horses in Serang and in West Papua. Across Banten, a 200-strong motorbike gang called the Komunitas Motor Literasi (Moli), brings books to homes from a box attached to their vehicles, delivered with the ease of a takeaway.” – The Guardian
Finally, An Online Space Where Black Artists In UK Can Find Each Other
“Make Online has been created by [Talawa] Theatre Company for artists across the UK, and is described as an online community that will give black British artists ‘ownership and agency of their careers’. It is available for black artists at all stages of their careers to develop networks with their peers and the wider industry through open discussions and event listings, as well as access job postings, commissions and castings.” – The Stage
How This Dancer With Cerebral Palsy Stays Performance-Ready
As a dancer with hemiplegia cerebral palsy, Jerron Herman has never been far from the physical therapy room — or an occupational therapist or some kind of medical interventionist. ‘I’m almost always in deep conversation with that kind of practitioner,’ says Herman, who performs with Heidi Latsky Dance. It’s part of keeping his body ready to dance — and to move throughout his daily life. Herman shared his routine with [Rachel Rizzuto].” – Dance Magazine
‘King Lear’ with Glenda Jackson and everything else that’s happening now
Great Shakespeare plays take the color of their surroundings – if the production is doing its job – and Broadway’ new King Lear is accomplishing that. But how could any alert, modern Lear production avoid the current parallels with lines such as “‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind” and “Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” – David Patrick Stearns
Gaillard With Parker, Gillespie, Marmarosa, et al
A Rifftides reader recently confessed to never having heard Slim Gaillard’s “Poppity Pop,”a 1945 recording with Charlie Parker as a sideman. The record might be dismissed as a period piece, a novelty, if it did not also include a ineup of mid-1940s Los Angeles all-stars. – Doug Ramsey
When Gustav Mahler Rode The New York Subways
Oh yes, he traveled by subway during his years (1908-11) as director of the New York Philharmonic. (He’d have taken one of the BMT lines to conduct at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the now-gone Ninth Avenue El to get home on the Upper West Side.) “Yet claiming Mahler as a New Yorker … is complicated,” writes David Patrick Stearns. “Connect the dots one way, New York was Mahler’s nightmare and possibly his undoing. Connect the dots another way, and Mahler himself was a nightmare no matter where he was.” – WQXR (New York City)
She Wasn’t Just A Pioneering Silent Film Director, She Was An Auteur — And Her Material Would Be Considered Sensitive Even Today
Caryn James: “A nude scene! Abortion; birth control; prostitution! In the silent-movie era, Lois Weber’s films were shockingly ahead of their time – and also immensely popular. She wrote, directed, produced and sometimes starred in her films, and in 1916 was the highest paid studio director in the US, man or woman. She pioneered techniques including split screen and double exposure, for a time ran her own studio, and along with Alice Guy-Blaché was one of the two women who contributed the most to cinema at its start. But she died alone, broke and nearly forgotten in 1939. What happened?” – BBC
Ali Stroker Talks About Doing Broadway Musicals In A Wheelchair
In the 2015 Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, Stroker became the first wheelchair-user Broadway actor, and she’s now playing Ado Annie (the girl who can’t say “no”) in the revisionist Daniel Fish staging of Oklahoma!. In a Q&A, she talks about what she sees her job as being (and not being) as a “mainstreamed” disabled performer, how she deals with a given theater’s accessibility issues, and showing the public a wheelchair-using character who’s also a sexual being. – Vulture
Instead Of Trashing Or Replacing Its Old-Style, Stereotyped Colonists-Meet-Indians Diorama, This Museum Is Interrogating It
The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a 1939 diorama purporting to show a diplomatic meeting between governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam (today’s Manhattan) and some Lenape Indians, and — not everything in it is wrong (Stuyvesant really did have a pegleg), but in 2019, you can’t call it accurate. So the Museum decided to make the diorama an exhibit on old stereotypes, with labeling explaining the differences between what’s shown and what’s known of the site’s actual history. Reporter Ana Fota has a look. – The New York Times