“These last stats can be spun positively: In the new-play world, male playwrights are down to just nearly half of all production credits, with women slowly but surely catching up. The glass-half-empty take, though, is that at this rate we won’t see gender parity (or women cracking the 50-percent ceiling, at least) in the new-play sector until roughly 2021.”
Blog
Legendary Samurai ‘Macbeth’ Production Returns After More Than Three Decades
“When it visited the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, this Macbeth” – staged by the revered Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa with his company, Saitama Arts Theater – “was declared an ‘overnight legend’, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty.” Saitama has now prepared a touring revival, which is coming to Britain next month, and, writes Andrew Dickson, it “still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.”
Study: Singing In A Choir Boosts Mindfulness
“The call for attention to numerous details such as watching the conductor, listening to the other voices in harmony, reading the music and/or remembering the words all contribute to reaching this attentive, aware, and accepting state.”
At The International Championship Of A Cappella
Jon Caramanca checks out the finals at Carnegie Hall: “There were groups striving to make a cappella their lives, groups that formed as passion projects and groups that seemed intent on dismantling the a cappella establishment from within by taking advantage of the competition’s open format to import styles of singing you won’t see at most college pre-frosh weekends. At times, and especially during the awards portion of the evening, that made for a confusing mandate, with global folk songs pitted against choral lite-gospel, and smarmy pop-rock alongside the familiar complex multipart vocal harmonizing (with vocal percussion!) that is a cappella’s public face.”
MoMA Associate Director Kathy Halbreich To Lead The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
In addition to promoting the works of Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, the foundation supports artists in the many fields in which he worked — painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking and performance. (It also runs a residency program in Rauschenberg’s former home on Captiva Island, Fla., but because the house was damaged by Hurricane Irma, the program was postponed this year.)
America’s Great Dictionary Of Regional Dialects To Shut Down
The six-volume-plus-online-updates Dictionary of American Regional English, the only project of its type based on in-person field research, was supported largely by grants from the likes of the NEH and the National Science Foundation. “The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize.” Jesse Sheidlower offers a eulogy.
The Declining Powers Of Orchestra Music Directors: Exhibit One – Simon Rattle
“In an ideal world, Rattle would tour the LSO around its own country, instead of everywhere abroad, with a rallying cry to raise standards. That won’t happen either, because the Arts Council won’t fund anything that treads on the toes of regional clients. All of which leaves Rattle with a job title that has less clout than a viscountcy, an honorific to deceive the media into believing in miracles. These inhibitions may help explain why the incoming music director has set such store on getting the public authorities to build him a new hall. That, at least, could be credited as a concrete achievement.”
Zuzana Růžičková, Harpsichordist Who Survived Three Nazi Camps, Dead At 90
Despite suffering damage to her hands during her Nazi ordeal as well as discrimination from Czech Communist authorities who considered her instrument a feudal and bourgeois relic, she went on to become a celebrated international soloist and the first musician to record J.S. Bach’s complete keyboard music on harpsichord.
Letter That Inspired Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ Reaches Its Final Destination
The 16,000-word, 19-page (single-spaced!) letter that Neal Cassady sent to Jack Kerouac in 1950 – and which, as reporter Jennifer Schuessler puts it, was “(allegedly) dropped off a houseboat, misfiled at a small Bay Area publisher, nearly tossed out with the trash, and then fought over by two literary estates’ – has ended up in Emory University Library’s Beat collection.
How Philadelphia’s Best Theatre Company Helped Turn Around The City’s Oldest Neighborhood
The Arden Theatre Company, launched 30 years ago by a couple of young Northwestern grads, started out in the little upstairs space at America’s oldest theatre (the Walnut Street). In 1994 they bought a 50,000-square-foot building a couple of blocks from the old waterfront, more or less under the Ben Franklin Bridge. Subscribers started going there – and eating dinner beforehand. Now the Old City neighborhood is Philly’s nightlife capital, and Arden has three stages and an apprentice program, and regularly wins critical acclaim and awards.