“I don’t take writing pans lightly. For one thing, I’m as thin-skinned as anyone else, and don’t enjoy being excoriated on Twitter or mocked as a theater snob or told on Facebook to just ‘relax’ – as if my being uptight were what made the show bad. … So when I get home from the theater with my notebook bristling with scribbles like ‘what is happening?’ and ‘kill me now,’ I ask myself a few questions. Was there anything at all I admired? Can I imagine why someone else might like it? Are there people I would send to the show despite my own distaste for it?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Opera Isn’t Elitist. If I Can Learn To Love It So Can Anybody.’
British comedian Chris Addison writes about how a chance event in a bar on a beer-soaked Friday night helped turn him into an opera fan – and how the same thing could happen to most anyone. “I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy.”
Could Harvey Weinstein And The #MeToo Movement Lead To The Demise Of Auteur Theory?
In her speech before presenting the Best Director Oscar this year, Emma Stone said, “It is the director whose indelible touch is reflected on every frame.” However, writes Ryan Gilbey, “the assumption that the director is present in every frame becomes problematic once that same director turns out to be a liability. … If the value of a movie can be attributed to a single film-maker, it becomes that much harder to argue that extracurricular misjudgments – and even crimes – can be expunged from what is on screen.”
How Archie Bunker Transformed The American Sitcom
In the first generations of television, reflecting the idea(l) of the “classless” American society, the families in sitcoms tended to be solidly middle-class: Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, etc. Even the Addams family and the Munsters were middle-class, if not wealthy. (The only real exceptions were The Honeymooners and the stereotyped “ethnic” comedies The Goldbergs, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and The Beverly Hillbillies, on which everyone but the Clampetts was rich.) Sascha Cohen offers a reevaluation of how things changed after Norman Lear created All in the Family.
Why Picasso Is So Massively Popular In East Asia (Yes, Even More Than In The West)
“Asian travellers are flocking to museums in the West to admire his artistic creations. Multi-million dollar paintings by the prolific artist have become the most sought after objects of desire among affluent Asian collectors in recent years. The reputations of other Western artists are no match to that of Picasso’s in this part of the world. Picasso is simply a synonym for Western art.” Vivienne Chow explores the reasons – which are much more than just the stratospheric prices his work commands.
Why Do Dictators Keep Fancying Themselves Literary Authors?
“How can you be a dictator without your sacred text, without a document to show your word is law?” From Lenin’s dense treatises and Hitler’s notorious memoir, through Mao’s “little red book” of aphorisms and Kim Jong-Il’s critical treatises on cinema and opera, to Türkmenbashi’s faux-folklore and Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, they just can’t stop themselves from churning out books. Colin Dickey examines the what and why.
Can The Classical Music World Just Drop The Whole ‘Maestro’ Thing Already?
“Amid the manifold campaigns to make classical music more accessible, less patriarchal, to take itself less absolutely seriously and to crack a smile – if not a joke – the outdated term is getting slightly grating to read. … [And] ‘maestro’ doesn’t fool anybody. If anything, it reveals a kind of uniquely fragile masculinity that sips time and again from the elixir of self-proclaiming ‘greatness’ in order to reaffirm its own status. The musicians, at least, don’t fall for it.”
What Exactly Do We Do? Everything! (A Librarian Tells You What The Job Is Really Like)
“Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you’re in the middle of those projects wonders if you’ve got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer. It’s endless questions. It’s ‘my two dollar fine pays your salary.’ It’s a grubby little hand at storytime grabbing your leg and smearing glitter glue down the side of pants you’ve already worn twice that week. It’s finding the right answer to a question and reveling in that small joy for a bare moment before another patron comes up to ask you something even weirder.”
How Director Marianne Elliott Wrestled With ‘Angels In America’ (And Tony Kushner)
As the UK National Theatre’s revival of the epic opens on Broadway, Michael Schulman talks to its director – known to US audiences for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time about the challenges and joys of staging the play and bringing to the States (and, yes, of dealing with its notoriously difficult famously engaged playwright).
ACLU Sues City Of New Orleans For Censoring Trump Mural
“[The suit is] on behalf of the resident Neal Morris, who is facing potential jail time over a mural painted on his private property that the city has demanded he remove. The mural, by the artist Cashy-D, depicts a quote from the 2005 Access Hollywood Tape in which US President Donald Trump brags about [you-know-what].”