“It’s Tick, Tick … Boom!: a show that ran Off Broadway in 2001 and was written by Jonathan Larson, the playwright and composer behind Rent. The musical, loosely based on Larson’s life, opened five years after he died in 1996. Mr. Miranda took part in a 2014 production Off Broadway at New York City Center.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Italian Parliament Members Furious At Mozart Production
“A British opera director has been lambasted by [right-wing] Italian MPs after staging an ‘anti-racist’ performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute featuring a bulldozer poised to raze a migrant tent camp. Graham Vick, of Birmingham Opera Company and a former director of Glyndebourne, revised the original plot in an experimental production at the Macerata opera festival.”
Rome’s Subway Expansion Keeps Digging Up Ancient Treasures
“The presence of ancient artifacts underground is a daunting challenge for urban developers. For archaeologists, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. ‘I think it’s the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me, professionally speaking,’ says Simona Morretta, the state archaeologist in charge of the Amba Aradam site. ‘Because you never get the chance in a regular excavation to dig so deep. That’s how we’ve found architectural complexes as important as this.'”
1,000-Year-Old City Walls Of Kano, Nigeria ‘May Not Survive The Rainy Season’
“The historic walls are under threat as never before from a combination of an exploding population that has put pressure on land and housing, as well as local politics. … Houses and commercial buildings have sprung up on [some] demolished sections or been turned into dumping grounds for rubbish, litter and sewage from the ever more crowded city. Elsewhere, excavators dig into the fortifications for the red iron- and aluminium-rich rock laterite, which is loaded onto donkeys and taken away for use in construction and renovation.”
Writers’ Festival In Australia Under Fire For Disinviting Politician And Germaine Greer
“[Their publisher] said dropping the controversial feminist and the outspoken former New South Wales premier from the September program [of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival] ‘seems counter to the ethos of freedom of speech’. The festival claimed it was merely trying to ensure a balance within the program in one case, and responding to the decisions of a partner organisation in another.” (Greer, of course, had some choice words on the matter.)
Leonard Bernstein: Free from gender with nothing to prove or lose
The pre-performance corridors of the Fisher Center at Bard College appeared to have been invaded by The Radical Faeries …
A report on Bard Summerscape’s revival of Lenny’s long-forgotten version of Peter Pan.
Announcing the new ArtsEngaged.com
While new is always (well, often) fun, what is most important to me about this website upgrade is the opportunity to share many more resources with the community engagement field.
Monday Recommendation: Pillow’s ‘Electric Miles’
Charles Pillow Large Ensemble, Electric Miles (Mama Records)
Whatever the title Electric Miles might lead you to expect, chances are that it wouldn’t be an album of non-electric big band music.
Why ‘Drunk History’ Is The Ideal Corrective To Most Documentary TV
Emily Nussbaum: “It’s informational, but it doesn’t mind that you don’t know everything, because it gets that nobody does. This openheartedness makes it educational television in a broader, emotional sense — it’s like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or Schoolhouse Rock!, if those shows had more orgies and Nazis.”
Cambodian Dance Begins To Take Root In (Of All Places) South Philly
Three years ago, Lanica Angpak started a social program to provide young women from Philadelphia’s Cambodian-American community with a safe place to deal with issues their traditional families might not handle so well. Now that program has become – at those young women’s request, not out of nudging from their elders – a class where an art form that barely survived the horrors that the late 20th century inflicted on Cambodia is being passed on.