The company expected to deliver “Bhutto” — a dramatic treatment of the history of Pakistan’s Bhutto political dynasty — this coming November. However, “Bhutto” has been removed from next season’s lineup and put on hiatus primarily due to lack of funding, according to the opera. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Blog
Laura Dern’s 40-Year Acting Career Has Been As Flexible As Her (Extraordinary) Face Is
Among the many anecdotes in Christine Smallwood’s profile: “She never dabbled in the drugs and alcohol that were omnipresent on film sets. Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols once pulled her aside while they were shooting Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and scared her straight. (Dern celebrated her 13th birthday on that set.) ‘I was saying to my mom, Who knew that the best thing to do would be to send your daughter to do a movie with the Sex Pistols for five months?'” – The New York Times Magazine
Man Dives To The Deepest, Remotest Place On Earth And Finds… Plastic
Vescovo, the Dallas-based co-founder of Insight Equity Holdings, a private equity fund, found the manmade material on the ocean floor and is trying to confirm that it is plastic. – The Guardian
‘The Most Holistic Approach To Creating Belonging That I Have Witnessed In A Theatre’
Critic Alex Rosenfeld writes about A Fierce Kind of Love, a devised play about the intellectual disability rights movement, and how everything about the production, from the integration of performers with disabilities into the development of the script and the cast to the provisions made by the presenter (FringeArts in Philadelphia) for audience members of varying (dis)abilities, demonstrated the difference between inclusion and belonging. – HowlRound
Ten Must-See Movies Setting The Buzz At Cannes
Bill Murray and zombies, Afghanistan, football. It’s an eclectic (to say the least) lineup this year. – The Guardian
A Vietnamese-American Theatre Critic Finally Sees Her Stories Onstage — And Feels What She Had Barely Known Was Missing
“There is a line in The Scarlet Letter: ‘She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom.’ I hadn’t known the weight of transposing myself into other people’s bodies until I no longer had to do it.” Diep Tran writes about Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks, the first two parts of a planned five-play cycle by Qui Nguyen about his family’s journey from Vietnam and settlement in the U.S. – American Theatre
E.O. Wilson On Creativity In Science And Humanities
“Science tends to advance sometimes in major jumps. Something is discovered, some mystery is solved, some system is for the first time understood and can be duplicated. When that happens, science moves quickly. I started thinking: What moves the creative arts? I thought, maybe a scientist could say something useful to innovators and masters of the humanities. I thought the next big thing could be at the interface of science and the creative arts.” Chronicle of Higher Education
How Exactly Do You Define ‘Camp’? You Shouldn’t Even Try (Sorry, Susan Sontag)
“Camp, an agent of nonsense, resists this exercise. Or actually, like a child, kind of ignores it and wanders elsewhere.” J. Bryan Lowder takes it as a basic principle that camp is, or ought to be, fun — and whatever Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” is, fun it ain’t. “One can walk out of Sontag’s brain and into a less oppressive headspace. One can have a relationship with camp not marked by acrimony. But getting there requires recognizing how we got here.” So Lowder does some deep-diving — well, Slip ‘N Slide-ing, actually. – Slate
Why Do Artists Tend To Be More Liberal? Study Says Their Brains Work Differently
“A recent study finds that such people are particularly good at imagining events that are far removed from their current reality. That imagination is, in a sense, their superpower, and it allows them to empathize with a wider range of people.” – Pacific Standard
90-Year-Old Composer Disrupts Opera Opening With 50-Year-Old Grudge Against Company
Just as the lights were going down at the State Theatre in Melbourne for the start of Opera Australia’s Rigoletto, George Dreyfus stood up and started yelling through a megaphone about the fact that the company had never produced the opera it had commissioned from him in 1969 and he turned in the following year. He went on for more than ten minutes at which point the police arrived. – Limelight (Australia)