Category: people

Michael Billington: “What I most admired about Hall at the National was his tenacity in withstanding industrial action, persistent attacks from disappointed members of the Olivier regime and media abuse.”

Hall’s most startling and lasting achievement is to have been the founding father of the UK’s two biggest subsidised theatres in the form that we now know them: the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Ben Brantley: “I don’t think Mr. Friedman” – who died last week at age 41 – “was accorded his due as an innovator. He wrote so fluently in so many styles, that it was tempting to dismiss him as a pastiche artist. … He was willing to let his music blend into the background in a way seldom associated with musical theater artists, who like to stamp their signatures big on a production.”

“Mr. Hall was long acknowledged as the leader and prime defender of a profession whose artistic health was often imperiled by financial cutbacks and political hostility in the second half of the 20th century. That the period was regarded as one of the theater’s greatest made his achievement all the more considerable. As a director, Mr. Hall introduced Samuel Beckett to English-speaking audiences, staged the premieres of eight of Harold Pinter’s plays, helped revolutionize the acting of Shakespeare and, as artistic director of the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1984 to 1990, brought a new realism to the performing of classic opera.”

Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, sculptor El Anatsui, artist Shirin Neshat, and architect Raphael Moneo are this year’s recipients of this year’s ¥15 million ($137,000) award, given by the Japan Art Association to honor achievement in fields not covered by the Nobel Prizes.

“While she was still in her teens Tchinarova danced with companies that formed in Europe after the death of Diaghilev. She travelled with Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Les Ballets 1933, Colonel. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes and finally to Australia in de Basil’s Monte Carlo Russian Ballet in 1936.” She settled there – and was married to actor Peter Finch when he was discovered by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (whose affair with Finch broke up his marriage to Tchinarova).

I must add a warning to music teachers. They will be horrified by this book. “I didn’t practice much and never went to my lesson fully prepared,” Mr. Hersch explains at the outset. Even in later years, he avoided the rote playing of scales and exercises: “I’m never sure what or how to practice, so I rarely do. But I seem to pull it together when the lights go up.” That may seem like a bad attitude for a professional musician, but I have a hunch that much of Fred Hersch’s greatness stems from avoiding over-preparation and embracing the risk-taking attitude jazz improvisation demands when played at a high level.

Escalante is one of the key figures associated with Lowbrow, a pop-inflected school of art that emerged in 1970s California, and which drew inspiration from underground comics, punk music, tattooing, the custom car scene, and surf and skate culture — the exact opposite of what the minimalist-minded mainstream art world was into during that era.

Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar in a statement said “Michael Friedman was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever.”

“Dr. Millett was a contemporary of Gloria Steinem’s – the Ms. Magazine co-founder was six months her senior – and along with Steinem became a driving force behind feminism’s ‘second wave’ that transformed the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.”