Category: people

Boyle was a creative original. “With Joan Hills, his partner since 1957, he took part in Britain’s first “happening,” which scandalised Edinburgh in 1963, developed early light shows for rock groups like Soft Machine, toured America with Jimi Hendrix and, in his lifelong project, worked with Hills and their children, Sebastian and Georgia, on events, assemblages and their extraordinary “earth pieces” – lifelike facsimiles of the surface of the Earth.”

Mark Boyle was one of the great unsung British artists of the late 20th Century. “Outside such circles, the Boyles have never fully achieved the degree of popularity merited by their art, although an important retrospective staged by Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2003 did much to redress this oversight.”

Theatre world lumninaries gather on Broadway to celebrate the life of playwright Arthur Miller, who died in February at the age of 89. “Some of the most poignant words spoken at the memorial were, not surprisingly, Mr. Miller’s own. Daniel Day-Lewis, who is married to Mr. Miller’s daughter Rebecca, read from an essay in Mr. Miller’s collection “Echoes Down the Corridor,” and Estelle Parsons read the speech Linda Loman gives at her husband’s funeral in “Death of a Salesman.” Joan Copeland, Mr. Miller’s sister, read from “The American Clock,” a Miller play inspired by Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times,” in which she starred on Broadway in 1980.”

“As Germany prepares to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the literary giant Friedrich Schiller this week, the celebrations are overshadowed by an embarrassing row over whether the skull inside Schiller’s coffin is really his. Schiller, the author of Wilhelm Tell and other celebrated plays – died on 9 May 1805, aged 45. His body was put in a mass grave in the local cemetery. Some 21 years later, Weimar’s mayor, Karl Leberecht Schwabe, decided to dig him up. Faced with a choice of 27 skulls, Schwabe put them all on a table and picked the biggest, declaring: ‘That must be Schiller’s.’ “

“The children of the late violinist Isaac Stern have won their case against a man they accused of squandering their father’s legacy. William Moorhead III, who acted as executor to Stern’s estate, was ordered by a judge in the US to pay back more than $500,000.”

Theatre critic and reporter Mel Gussow wrote more than 4000 reviews for the New York Times over 35 years. “Gussow was long associated with Off and Off Off Broadway, the traditional home of experimental writers. He was often one of the first to take the city’s young emerging playwrights seriously, as he did with Sam Shepard, David Mamet and John Guare. As a critic, he tended to view his role as advisory rather than adversarial and was an early enthusiast of talents like Robert Wilson, Charles Ludlam and Richard Foreman, and later Julie Taymor. “

Composing is an art that usually requires great practice and refinement before a practitioner can be judged to have reached the upper echelons. But among Scotland’s crop of hot young composers is a 28-year-old who is already being compared to composing’s elder statesmen. Stuart MacRae is not a relentless self-promoter, but as official composer of the BBC Scottish Symphony, his work is becoming known throughout the UK and beyond.

Andrew Davis, 61, may be “the most forthcoming, honest and human conductor in the business. It may be the Brit in him (even the Financial Times called him “the quintessential English conductor”), but he politely and sincerely answers questions that other conductors would run from.”

Set and costume design is not exactly the most high-profile part of the theatre world, but those who can do it well are some of the more in-demand individuals working onstage. At the top of this particular game is Santo Loquasto, whose work is so revered in theatre and opera circles that, in a recent week, he had four show openings in three cities in two countries.

“Henry Villierme was on the fast track to becoming one of the new painting stars emerging from the Bay Area Figurative Group in the late 1950s. He was so promising that he took a first prize at a 1957 art exhibition in Richmond while future famed artists Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira and David Park received just honorable mentions. But unlike his contemporaries, Villierme never made that leap to worldwide recognition. Instead, he moved to Southern California to be closer to his wife’s family and raised his four children while earning money in different odd jobs.” Now, Villierme is enjoying a career renaissance in San Francisco, thanks to his agent son and an enthusiastic gallery owner.