“These ballet dancers are great and they’re ready and what they need is more interesting work. I feel people are playing it safe a lot. If anything, I think it’s the choreographers and the directors who need to make an effort for these dancers who have made this art form their passion, and to really be as daring or at least as relevant as some of our peers were when they were commissioning pieces a long time ago.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
When Philadelphia Eliminated Arts Programs From Its Schools, Here’s How Local Foundations Stepped Up
“Most obviously, the city’s financial woes were so calamitous that, funders, most of whom already had extensive footprints in the city, had no choice but to respond en masse. Samuel Johnson’s old adage applies here: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ That being said, there’s far more to Philadelphia’s success than the threat of (figurative) imminent hanging.”
Amazon Moves Into Australia, Which May Not Be Prime Territory
“When Borders opened in 2002 across the street from Readings, Melbourne’s best-known independent bookseller, retail experts predicted catastrophe for the musty old shop competing with the shiny new chain store. Instead, Australians rejected Borders right into bankruptcy.” As Amazon launches its book business there, Damien Cave reports, there’s a chance it may not catch on much better than Borders did, thanks to some unique features of the Australian market.
Upright Citizens Brigade, Famed Improv Troupe, Is Leaving Its Home
The company, founded by Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh and Matt Besser and the training ground for many comedians, sketch actors and Saturday Night Live cast members, is moving from its longtime base in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to the group of Off-Broadway theaters on the far west end of 42nd Street.
Enough With The Star Actors Playing Hamlet Already!
“If, in any given year, somewhere up and down the UK, you can see a starry production of Hamlet being staged with Big-Name Acclaimed Actors showing off their Big-Name Acclaimed Acting Chops, then the cachet of that role is reduced. No question. It’s the basic economics of scarcity: when every Tom (Hiddleston), Dick (Burton) and Jude Law has had a crack at moodily wafting on stage, like a Smiths fan in search of legitimate melancholy, then theatre’s great and good might consider that it is time to call a moratorium on more Hamlets.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.19.17
The Society of the Spectacle
Does one really need to see Swiss filmmaker Jean-Stéphane Bron’s The Paris Opera? … read more
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2017-10-19
What’s Growing in Albion?
The title of the new Mike Bartlett/Rupert Goold collaboration at the Almeida Theatre (until 24 November) tells you everything. “Albion” is, after all, just another name for this island, … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2017-10-19
New Film ‘The Death of Stalin’ Is A Madcap Farce – But In Russia, They’re Not Amused
The satire by Armando Ianucci (creator of Veep) is getting great early reviews in Britain (The Guardian‘s critic called it the movie of the year). The Russians beg to differ – even though no one there has seen it and the distributor hasn’t even applied for a license for it yet. A pro-Kremlin newspaper pro-Kremlin newspaper called the film “a nasty sendup by outsiders who know nothing of our history”; one politician said it was a “planned provocation” and another described it as an “unfriendly act by the British intellectual class … [part of an] anti-Russian information war.”
Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea
Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci’s new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin’s victims deserve better: “The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits … will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin’s modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state.”
The Best Optical Illusions Of 2017
The prize-winning images, chosen by readers of Scientific American, play with our perceptions of shape, motion, and length. Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde talks with the three winners about how their illusions work.
The Top-Tier Medical School With Its Own Theater Company
A reporter visits Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons to watch the Bard Hall Players rehearse Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Every member of the cast and crew is a medical student; several have degrees and/or previous professional experience in music or theater.