Hmmm: “Every era in Hollywood has a symbolic epicenter, a place that sums up everything, especially power and sometimes absurdity.” Apparently, that’s now Netflix. “An 80-foot by 12-foot video screen makes visitors feel like they are inside Netflix shows — visiting the Narcos cocaine lab, for instance, or sitting on the Blue Cat Lodge boat dock from Ozark. Another wall is covered by at least 3,500 plants, a living mural that includes red Flamingo Lilies, known for their big pistils.” – The New York Times
Blog
An Author Explains The Most Overrated Novel
In short, Sarah Moss says, “I think it’s called the Great American Novel.” Zing! – The Guardian (UK)
The Complexities Of Making A Musical About Race, Told From The Point Of View Of A Young White Woman
When a team decided to adapt Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 book The Secret Life of Bees into a 2019 musical, and the only African American person on the production team was playwright Lynn Nottage, well, they knew they had some discussions ahead of them. Nottage says, “What makes this very different from those other stories [like The Help or Green Book], is that this white girl enters into a black space, and she has to negotiate a space that’s alien to her, rather than the black body entering the white space.” – NPR
In This Professional Orchestra, All Of The Musicians Got Sorted
Into Harry Potter houses, that is. Way to go, Philadelphia. – Philly Voice
Five Things To Watch For At The Emmy Nominations
Did the voters love the final season of Game of Thrones more than mere mortals did? And how many nominations can the second season of Fleabag get when the first season got exactly zero? – Los Angeles Times
Why Are Audiobooks Booming So Much Right Now?
And are they OK for the brain? Some studies show that people retain information from a printed page much more than from an audiobook. “it might be that the particular cadences and timbre of an actor’s voice in audiobooks provide musical information that helps longer-term recall, just as the visual and tactile information of where a passage lies in a printed book can.” – The Guardian (UK)
Theatre Criticism Is At A Crossroads
Theatre criticism, like every other kind of critique in the age of the internet, appears to be booming, but that’s not really true. “How is the average theatregoer to sort quality from digital noise and (perhaps more importantly) support those who create high level critiques? Education is key—not just for the would-be theatre critics but for audience members in general.” – Howlround
Dear Musicians, Pay Your Dancers
Yeah, doing work “for the exposure” and vague promises of pay isn’t really great. “Some dancers were going for that because it was a good opportunity and gives you more of a profile and helps to build your CV, but it’s not a good deal. It’s not fair. At the end of the day we deserve fair payment.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Opera Star Who Says Twitter Has Been A Real Lifesaver
Sure, Twitter has issues. And then it has this: “At 58, [Karita] Mattila, who is currently onstage here at the Aix Festival in Weill and Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” is having something of a late-career renaissance: a newly expanding repertoire and newfound celebrity on Twitter, where she is beloved by some of opera’s most ardent fans. And she loves them right back.” – The New York Times
Will Finding Shakespeare’s London Home Tell Us More About His Plays?
That’s the idea of the search, truly. Historian Geoff Marsh “concluded from cross-referencing various tax and leasehold documents of the time … that the playwright – then in his early 30s – almost certainly lodged in St Helen’s Place, Bishopsgate, just south of Liverpool Street station. It was one of the City’s more affluent parishes, and he would have been living among well-travelled physicians, merchants, lawyers, musicians and writers.” – The Stage (UK)