“Raised in a Boston tenement with a shared bathroom, … Sumner Redstone [was] a combative and daring dealmaker who in his 60s turned his family’s movie theater chain into one of the world’s largest media empires, with holdings that included Paramount Pictures film studios, CBS, MTV and the publishing house Simon & Schuster.” – The Washington Post
Author: Matthew Westphal
Disney Drops 20th Century Fox Brand Entirely
“Shedding the Fox name entirely from 20th Century Fox Television in the wake of the Disney-Fox merger, that studio will now be known as 20th Television. … Nixing ‘Fox’ from 20th TV was part of the negotiated merger terms between Disney and 21st Century Fox in order to prevent confusion among consumers. On the film side, 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight removed ‘Fox’ from their names in January.” – Variety
COVID Strikes Bolshoi And Mariinsky Ballets
According to reports on the Russian broadcast network RBC, one dancer at the Bolshoi (where rehearsals for the fall are underway) has gotten sick and 59 dancers and rehearsal pianists have been quarantined. At the Mariinsky, where opera performances are underway and the ballet Giselle opens on Aug. 13, “two or three” dancers are ill, classes and rehearsals are suspended, and company members who aren’t performing that day have been asked to stay out of the theater. – Gramilano (Milan)
Berlin Says Choirs There May Start Singing Together Again
“The Senate of the City of Berlin has announced a decision to allow choral singing in closed spaces to resume, under very strict and precise regulation.” (Very strict and precise, in fact.) – OperaWire
Christmas Pantos All Over England Are Cancelled; Theatres Face Crippling Losses
“Theatres are entering a critical stage in their fight for survival, with the cancellation of the 2020/21 pantomime season expected to cost the industry more than £90 million in lost revenue. … Some [theatres] have said that their annual pantomimes can provide almost 50% of their yearly income in just over a month.” – The Stage
UK’s Summer Theatres Work Through, Around, And With COVID Restrictions
A stage on the beach in Brighton with audience groups at picnic tables. A solo show in a Belfast shopping mall and another amid the Narnia sculptures in C.S. Lewis Square. And, of course, open-sided tents in car parks and on lawns. Here’s how regional theatre festivals are making sure the show goes on. – The Guardian
Closet Cleaning
For a lot of us, these last few months have provided an opportunity to clean out and organize our closets, cupboards, garages, and workshops. (Stick with me, there will be a point to this.) – Doug Borwick
Parallel musical universes? More lost continents? The early-music movement in New York explores an endless past
One stands back and marvels how horizons have kept expanding in the music before J.S. Bach, with modern premieres of 400-year-old works by names you’ve barely heard of — and leave you wanting more. – David Patrick Stearns
Judit Reigl, Painter Who Abandoned Breton And Surrealism For Abstraction And The Human Body, Dead At 97
It was only a short time after Breton gave her her first solo show in Paris that she left the artistic movement he spearheaded, developing a muscular, energetic approach to abstract art. Roughly a decade later, she began applying that approach to partially abstracted (and muscular) human figures. – ARTnews
Martha Graham’s ‘Lamentation’ Is Just The Piece We Need In The Time Of COVID
Dana Naomy Mills: “The theme of the universality of grief, as well as the tension of confinement and expansion that echo throughout Graham’s performance, acquire a double meaning by being viewed at this time, when contemporary spectators, shielding from the virus, are isolated inside their own grief.” – Psyche