Nathan Lucky Wood, on watching a play about homelessness performed for homeless youth: “A young man raises his hand. He wants to ask a question. Why have they come here to perform a play which is so depressing? Being homeless is already hard. He was excited to see a play because he thought he could forget about that. But now he had been reminded of it, and he felt awful. He wanted to know, what had been the point? The facilitator didn’t have an answer. Nor, having worked across theatre and homeless services for years now, do I.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why I Wanted To Reboot ‘Roseanne’ For The Age Of Trump
Whitney Cummings, co-showrunner of the revived sitcom, wanted to break beyond the liberal media bubble: “Since tweeting wasn’t working, maybe giving my brain to a show that touched the hearts and got the eyeballs of so many working-class people is how I could finally do my part to help us all make sense of the election. … This show is not about Trump – it’s about the circumstances that made people think Trump was a good idea.”
Should Different Theatres Have Distinct Artistic Identities?
Matt Trueman: “There have been times, over the last decade, where London’s major theatres have felt rather interchangeable. Plenty of shows could have been scooped up from one programme and set down in another without seeming at all out of place. … Artistic identity, like any identity, isn’t a concrete thing. It’s amorphous and indistinct; fluid, not fixed … a complex amalgamation of a number of things – history, aesthetics, even audience. It’s more easily intuited than definitely expressed. It can be changed and betrayed, diminished and lost.”
It’s The Largest Gift Ever Given To A Philosophy Department: $75 Million
“Bill Miller, the value investor who famously beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for 15 consecutive years (and whose faith in bank stocks later won a mocking depiction in the movie The Big Short), has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University.”
Atlanta Opera And Ballet To Add Seasons At New Suburban Arts Center
“The Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Ballet will be among the performing arts groups to help break in a new venue, the Performing Arts Center at City Springs on Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, during its inaugural 2018-19 season.”
Joe Frank, Unique Public Radio Monologuist, Dead At 79
He began his career in free-form radio at WBAI, New York City’s Pacifica affiliate, and – after a brief, unlikely stint as host of NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered – spent decades at Southern California’s KCRW. Ira Glass was once one of his production assistants; he and host Madeleine Brand remember Frank in this audio segment from Press Play.
Misty Copeland And Her Mentor, A Pioneering Black Ballerina Of The 1950s
“[Raven] Wilkinson, now 82, risked death and arrest by touring with the [Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo] in the South during a period when it was illegal for black and white dancers to share a stage. Though circumstances have changed in the years since then, the saga of what she went through is still relevant to today’s dancers, says Copeland.”
Bayeux Tapestry To Be Displayed In Britain For First Time In 950 Years
The 229-foot-long work of embroidered linen, which depicts the Norman Conquest of England and is thought to date from a few years after it, will be lent by France to the UK five years from now, once tests have confirmed that it isn’t too fragile to be transported.
New Vincent Van Gogh Drawing Discovered, Another Authenticated
“The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry was acquired in 2014 by the Van Vlissingen Art Foundation, which then showed the work to specialists at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. After research into the subject, style, technique, materials and provenance, they concluded that it is indeed by the artist. … What adds to the importance of the discovery is that the Van Gogh Museum is now accepting a similar work in its own collection that it had rejected a few years ago.”
Surprise Ending Of ‘Carmen’ Starts Debate About PC And #MeToo In Italy
At the end of a new production of the Bizet opera at the Maggio Musicale theater in Florence, instead of being knifed by Don José, Carmen steals his gun and shoots him. By German standards of Regieoper this is very minor, but “afterwards theatrical purists, media pundits and conservative politicians derided the change as an example of political correctness going too far. … With a general election due in Italy in early March, this debate quickly moved to the political stage.”