Author: Matthew Westphal

Where’s Cher? Is Mackie Too Tacky? Metropolitan Museum Goes “Camp” for Costume Institute Show

The Metropolitan Museum has just announced that its next Costume Institute extravaganza will be Camp: Notes on Fashion, May 9-Sept. 8, 2019. (Rest in Peace, Susan Sontag.) But Cher, with a show about to open on Broadway, doesn’t seem to be involved, and how can the Costume Institute have a show like this with none of the gowns Bob Mackie designed for her?

The Big Story On Broadway This Season Is That Plays Are Outshining Musicals

“It was just last season when theater lovers were wringing their collective hands as big brand musicals descended on Times Square … No more. In a turnabout no one on Broadway expected, this season is rich with drama — ambitious, challenging, risky work, most of it new and most of it American.” Says one producer, “It’s no accident that all these plays are happening now. It’s how artists react to what’s happening in the culture.”

At The First Chopin Competition To Use 19th-Century Pianos

Reporter Julien Hanck visits Warsaw and talks with two jury members and all six finalists about the challenges and joys of using instruments from Chopin’s own lifetime and about their own experience with those pianos. (One prizewinner had been playing them since he was 12, another started as a harpsichordist, and one finalist had never played anything older than an early-20th-century Erard.)

How Columbus Day Made Anti-Columbus Day Protests Possible

Yoni Appelbaum: “Columbus Day, a solemn occasion marked by parades, pageantry, and buckets of fake blood splashed on statues of its namesake. Activists have turned the commemoration of Columbus’ landfall in the New World into an annual protest against ‘the celebration of genocide.’ What the protesters may not know, however, is that the holiday they are protesting once played a crucial role in forging a society capable of listening to their concerns. This is the curious tale of how Columbus Day fell victim to its own remarkable success.”

How Novelist Tana French Writes Her Famous Red Herrings

“I’m always more interested in mystery books where ‘whodunit?’ isn’t the biggest question of all. Even if the red herring doesn’t feed into whodunit, because of course it can’t, it feeds into more integral questions: What makes the detective go down that sidetrack? … A bunch of times I’ve started off writing something thinking, ‘This might be the solution’ and then going, ‘This totally can’t be the solution, it doesn’t fit — but I can see why the narrator might want it to be the solution.'”

Brexit Plans Will Create ‘Bureaucratic Nightmare’ For Tours And ‘Strangle The Supply Of Vital Talent’, Say UK Arts Leaders

“According to the immigration proposals, announced earlier this month, there will be no preferential treatment for European Union workers, who will have to apply for specific category visas to come and work in the UK, as is the case for workers from the rest of the world. The visas will be restricted to applicants who have a confirmed job offer and earn a minimum of £30,000 a year pro-rata, with the potential for it to rise to £50,000, a situation that leading figures have warned is not fit for purpose.”

Snapchat, Following Facebook And YouTube, Moves Into Producing Original Video Content

“With NBCUniversal’s help, the struggling social media giant preps more than a dozen original series for its 188 million users as it muscles into a crowded market. … But its slate won’t be ripped from the Netflix playbook. All Snapchat scripted series will average about five minutes an episode and be released daily in the signature vertical video format.”

Albert Barnes’s Grouchy Letters To Leopold Stokowski Make For New Barnes Foundation-Philadelphia Orchestra Joint Project

“[The collector] referred to Mahler’s ‘spectacular banalities,’ Wagner’s ‘voluptuous debauches,’ and Weber’s ‘inanities.’ … ‘Why give us so much … that nourishes the idle, the ignorant, the lazy, the debauche, to whom in music the only thing is the cheap emotional orgy?” Yes, the Barnes and the Philadelphians are building two programs out of this — and they should be good ones.