Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, Daniel Fish’s very revisionist Oklahoma! — all are in the Off-Off-Broadway mode of messing with both the form and content of conventional theater, and all are or have been on Broadway (the ultimate conventional theater ecosystem) this season. And such recent Broadway successes as A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 have a similar pedigree. Diep Tran talks to the creators of these works about crossing the downtown-uptown (non-)divide. – American Theatre
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Modernism, Interracial Relations, Cultural Appropriation, And Katherine Dunham Meet (Or Collide) In A 1933 Ballet In Chicago
Liesl Olson investigates the strange and stirring history of La Guiablesse, an almost entirely lost 18-minute dance work based on French Caribbean folklore, with a white choreographer/star (Ruth Page) playing a she-devil, an otherwise entirely black cast, a colorful score by black composer William Grant Still, and the future star and pioneer Dunham as the spurned lover. (She took over as the eponymous demon the following year.) – Chicago Reader
Poet Linda Gregg Dead At 76
“[She] did not publish her first collection, Too Bright to See (1981), until she was almost 40. But once she did, she drew quick attention in poetry circles. … {and she] taught poetry at Columbia, the University of Iowa, Princeton and other institutions. Her many honors included the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Jackson Poetry Prize.” – The New York Times
What It’s Like To Sing Wagner’s ‘Ring’ With The Met’s Mammoth ‘Machine’
Christine Goerke (Brünnhilde) and Greer Grimsley (Wotan) talk about working on, with, and around director Robert Lepage’s big, complicated contraption — and how it’s been changed in the sixe years since it was new. (For one thing, it’s much safer, and so, says Goerke, “it’s really kind of fun.”) – New York Observer
For Reading To Young Children, Hard-Copy Books Are Better Than E-Books: Study
University of Michigan researchers found that “reading print books together generated more verbalizations about the story from parents and from toddlers, more back and forth ‘dialogic’ collaboration. (‘What’s happening here?’ ‘Remember when you went to the beach with Dad?’)” – The New York Times
CalArts Students Fight Skyrocketing Tuition From Two Different Angles
“Like their peers all over the US, students at California Institute of the Arts … face increasingly high tuition bills each year, and they’re reaching a breaking point. Students have both protested the tuition hikes and attempted to raise funds for the university, and the board has recognized their efforts and committed to doing something about it.” – Nonprofit Quarterly
‘An Astonishing Creation’ — Jean Nouvel’s National Museum Of Qatar Opens
“In its sprawling nearly mile-long loop of galleries, the museum tells the story of how this tiny nation of nomadic Bedouins and pearl divers became, with the discovery of natural gas, the most wealthy country per capita on Earth in just 50 years.” But without a single entirely vertical surface in the place, none of the exhibits hang on the walls. (For a larger selection of exterior and interior photos, click here.) – The Guardian
What Does The Brexit Chaos Mean For The Performing Arts? (Very Little Good)
“Performing arts exports to Europe … are worth £360 million to the UK, but that and numerous jobs are under threat from a disorderly departure from the EU. Mark Shenton talks to senior theatremakers and festival organisers about what happens next for an industry they fear may become isolated and insular.” – The Stage
Paris’s Châtelet Theatre Reopens, With A Renovated Building And A ‘Robin Hood’ Mission
“One of [its] first acts will be to introduce a scheme for theatregoers to buy extra tickets for those who cannot afford them. … The theatre will also offer 10,000 €10 tickets a year to the under-25s, and there are also plans to take artists out into the community, particularly the more gritty areas of the city and its banlieues, to work with local groups, schools and colleges and encourage wider participation in the theatre and its productions.” – The Guardian
Why China’s Biggest Film Superstar Was Disappeared (And How She’s Slowly Coming Back)
Fan Bingbing’s place atop China’s movie pantheon is hard to describe to Westerners; she’s sort of a combination Jennifer Lawrence-Nicole Kidman-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock. (In the West, she’s appeared in the X-Men and Iron Man franchises.) Very suddenly last year, she vanished from public view, she was loudly denounced in a few official media outlets, and her ongoing projects were put on hold. Journalist May Jeong looks into the reason for her precipitous fall and the warning it sent to the entire Chinese film industry. – Vanity Fair