“Theater people resent “Cats” not just because it made Broadway uncool until “Hamilton” finally rescued it from the pop cultural stocks. What really infuriates buffs is that “Cats” ushered in an era of grandiose spectacle, the vacuous parade of shows from the 1980s and early ’90s that made it seem as if a musical had to have a helicopter or a crashing chandelier to be worth the rapidly rising ticket price.” – Los Angeles Times
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“Beetlejuice” Has Been A Hit – What Its Surprise Closing Says About Today’s Broadway
Broadway’s supply and demand for theatres is a far cry from the mid 1980s, when commercial theatre in New York in general seemed like it might be on the ropes. Hamilton, Moulin Rouge!, The Lion King and Wicked all grossed more than $2 million last week, and To Kill a Mockingbird – a play – grossed $700,000 more than Beetlejuice – evidence of how expectations and earnings are being recalibrated. – The Stage
The Ten Top-Selling Books Of The 2010s
Though the list is all fiction, overall the trend is moving towards nonfiction on the best-seller lists. According to Lee Graham of the NPD Group, “In 2010, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling titles were fiction, and by 2019 that percentage dropped to 32 percent.” – LitHub
Requiem For The Newseum, A “Museum” For News
The Newseum was “prey to the economic and cultural forces that have bedeviled institutions as diverse as symphony orchestras and the electronic media. It had to compete for audience and achieve the right balance between substance and entertainment. Like so many organizations in American society, it struggled to find a compromise between being authoritative and being accessible.” – Washington Post
Words For Emotions Tend To Translate Poorly From One Language Into Another: Study
“[Researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill] report how they carried out an analysis of 24 emotional concepts, such as anger, love and pride, across 2,474 languages. The study also included more than 2,400 non-emotional concepts — such as ‘quarrel’ — that were used to further explore meanings and context of emotion words.” – The Guardian
Cree Decree: Monkman Debunks U.S. Creation Myths in His Metropolitan Museum Commission
In my skeptical post last month about Cree artist Kent Monkman’s plans for the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall, I recklessly ventured some premature commentary. This “squeamish critic” has now eyeballed Monkman’s magnum opus is visually intriguing and intellectually thought-provoking. – Lee Rosenbaum
Tracking Down (And Saving) Hollywood’s Movie Backdrops
“Hollywood started as a green industry and then became brown. Everything was used repeatedly; nothing went into storage. Then when studios began to decline, they got rid of everything, sold things in auctions or just threw them away. And the first to go were backings. We will never know how many were lost, and if I go down that road I will just start to cry.” – Los Angeles Times
The Frenchman Who Created Russian Ballet As We Know It
Just about anyone who knows a bit of ballet history has heard of Marius Petipa, the man behind Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. Yet not many people know just how he came to end up at the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg and what he did there for 63 years. Joan Acocella fills us in. – The New York Review of Books
The Politics Of Self-Plagiarism
“As a transgression, plagiarism comes with a fully operational stigma attached. Not so with self-plagiarism. It can be forbidden but without the benefit of shame as a reinforcement. I did find it denounced as unethical while reading through some 50-odd articles or papers mentioning it, most of them from scholarly journals. At least as frequent, though, were suggestions that a certain amount of self-plagiarism is inevitable — and perhaps even necessary.” – Inside Higher Education
How Three Great Actresses In Their 90s Keep Their New York Stage Careers Going
Okay, Lois Smith is only 89 — and she’s currently on Broadway in The Inheritance. Estelle Parsons, 92, is at the Public in Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day. Vinie Burrows is 95 and begins an Off-Broadway play next month — and, as a Black actor, has spent much of her long career creating her own opportunities. Laura Collins-Hughes meets the three of them for tea and talk about staying in regular work at their ages. – The New York Times