Author: ArtsJournal2

Broadway Is Becoming A Place For Chummy Nights With Actors And Their Fanbases

Seriously, it seems to be almost a new genre. “These performances were rendered with a disarming, self-interrupting casualness, suggesting a happy ham at home among friends. And they often directly involved the audience. ‘Do you want it? Do you want it?’ [Kristin] Chenoweth shouted to the audience, before she hit a high D in concluding a song. [Ian] McKellen, in his show’s second act, asked theatergoers to yell out names of plays by Shakespeare, to cue whatever he did next.” – The New York Times

Should The LA Phil Take Over The Ford Theatre?

On the agenda for Tuesday’s Los Angeles Supervisors board meeting: Having the L.A. Philharmonic take over the outdoor Ford Theatre. According to the supervisor who made the proposal, “It is the most wonderful, intimate summer night venue. … You’re outside, the hills are beautiful, but you’re not in a great, great, great big Bowl — which is fine for a whole lot of stuff.” – LAist

Is It Worth Waiting Two Hours In Line For A Few Minutes In A Kusama Infinity Mirrored Room?

Well: “That depends on how much you value your time — and what you expect of art in the age of Instagram. The smartphone, with its ever-finer cameras and ever-shinier screens, now shapes our experience of art as thoroughly as the church did in 14th-century Italy or the unadorned, white-cube galleries did for midcentury abstract painters.” – The New York Times

Here’s A Snowflake From The First Full-Length ‘Nutcracker’ In The U.S.

Seventy-five years ago, in a San Francisco busy with Naval activity in the middle of WWII, the San Francisco Ballet staged the first full-length Nutcracker in the U.S. The snow is still falling – but there’s a lot more of it now than there was in 1944, when 16 white-clad ballet corps members danced with sparkler-style sticks around the stage. – San Francisco Chronicle

Is Memoir Writing Selfish?

Michelle Tea, author of several memoirs and novels, says (in her new book called, er, Against Memoir) that it certainly is. “Examining the need to record her experiences in the title essay, she writes: ‘Personal narrative is a mental illness, but you don’t want to be well.’ She tells me how the compulsion to write is similar to the craving to drink.” – The Guardian (UK)

So They Hired Phoebe Waller-Bridge Of ‘Fleabag’ Fame To Help The James Bond Movies Out

Remember how Carrie Fisher (RIP, General) used to punch up scripts? It’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s time now. She’s the second woman – only the second – to get a writing credit on a Bond movie on the six-decade franchise. She says she wasn’t trying to fix the, shall we say, anti-feminist message of many early Bond films: “They were just looking for tweaks across a few of the characters and a few of the storylines.” – BBC

The Greta Thunberg Of The Theatre

Isabella Madrigal, a tribally enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians in California, and a 17-year-old, figured out, as she had a hard time finding good roles, that she could shape her own narrative. She explains, “if there is a lack of Native actors, it’s because there’s a lack of Indigenous storytellers. This lack of representation goes beyond just not seeing a Native face in the media. That’s certainly part of the issue, but it’s not the entire thing because our defining stories are also missing from the national narrative.” – The Desert Sun (Palm Springs)