Category: people

“Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there’s no reason for it to be. I don’t want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.”

“Of all the characteristics which define Argentinian tenor Marcelo Alvarez, one shouts loudest: he had never been to an opera until he was 32… Within a year, he had made a celebrated operatic debut at La Fenice, Venice, the theatre which kickstarted the careers of Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. Now 44, Alvarez ranks as a colossus of the operatic scene. How could all this have happened so quickly?”

Art critic Robert Hughes has written a memoir. “One object of this book is to settle a few scores with those who think like that. It’s not the only one. The autobiographical narrative, an odyssey through the Bohemia of Sydney and London in the late 1950s and 1960s, breaks from time to time while Hughes delivers a vivid peroration on some subject close to his heart.”

“Todd Bolender, an internationally known dancer and choreographer who left a distinctive imprint on the New York City Ballet and its forerunner companies before leading the Kansas City Ballet and troupes abroad, died on Thursday in Kansas City, Kan. He was 92 and lived in Kansas City, Mo.”

The playwright of the moment in the American theatre is 32-year-old Sarah Ruhl, whose award-winning, much-buzzed-about play, “The Clean House,” is at last hitting New York; whose lower-profile drama, “Eurydice,” earned a near-benediction from The New York Times a few weeks ago; and — oh, the other thing — who made her way onto the genius list when she became a MacArthur Fellow last month. “The superstitious part of me goes, ‘Uh-oh, when is the other shoe going to drop?’ ” she said. “There is so much happening at once. But the nonsuperstitious part of me is trying to enjoy it and see it as the result of 10 years of labor.”

Director Martin Scorcese says he’s going to quit Hollywood and make low-budget films. “When there are very big budgets there is less risk that can be taken,’ he said at the Rome Film Festival. The director said his next project would be a ‘small-scale’ adaptation of Japanese novel The Silence.”

“According to documents lodged with the trademarks registry in London, the multi-millionaire former Beatle has begun a process to trademark his name for use on goods as wide-ranging as pantihose, waistcoats and vegetarian food.”

John Moore writes that he knows the relationship between critics and the community in which they write can be complicated. But a confrontation between Cleveland Plain Dealer theatre critic Tony Brown and the head of the city’s biggest theatre was “just absurd. How can the head of a regional theater company lead his institution to great standing when he is behaving like a child? Bloom has lost credibility with his staff and subscribers and brought embarrassment to his theater.”

He was a fixture at Stage magazine. “He was a wonderfully eccentric man. Even though he sometimes gave the impression it was a bit of a chore, he went to the theatre more than any of us even. He was unstoppable and indefatigable.”

“Danièle Huillet, the French-born filmmaker who, in collaboration with her husband, Jean-Marie Straub, created some of the most challenging and intensely debated motion pictures of the modernist era, died on Monday at the home of friends in the Loire Valley in France. She was 70.”