Category: today’s top story

“On Aug. 18, the Groupon online ‘deal of the day’ offered discounted subscriptions to the upcoming season of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Within 24 hours, 2,338 people had taken the bait, the Joffrey announced the following day in a press release.”

“As the first play penned by a woman opens at Shakespeare’s Globe today – breaking a 411-year tradition – top theatre directors report a surge in prominent female playwrights, with a wave of talented women coming to the fore in Britain’s male-dominated theatres.”

“The endowment of the tiny, historic school in Nashville, which opened its doors to newly freed slaves in 1865, is depleted. Every building on the campus … has been mortgaged. Fisk President Hazel R. O’Leary says that the only asset of real value left is the Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art.”

“Over the last decade, many universities have invested in eye-catching architecture aimed, he says, at attracting investors and business, as a way of transforming places that should be free-thinking and outside the immediate commercial equation into marketing-driven “brands”. Students have become “customers” in business-style machines for teaching; these are expected to serve the economy by slotting graduates neatly into profitable jobs.”

Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe’s new program “pays a handful of theater artists, dancers, and musicians (at this point all local) to create work. It gives them the space to do it, the equipment to do it right, small audiences to react as it evolves, and the oversight of a major-festival producer to guide it to polished completion.”

“P&O has its own on-board theatre company with more than 100 entertainers, Royal Caribbean is staging cruise versions of Hairspray and Chicago, and elsewhere there are licensed versions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals or other popular shows such as Saturday Night Fever.“

“The winter issue of the award winning Virginia Quarterly Review was abruptly canceled after staff members removed their names from the masthead while an investigation procedes into accusations that a top editor committed suicide as a result of workplace bullying.”

“In some ways, the traffic in quick music clips on YouTube resembles the voraciousness of opera audiences two centuries ago. But the rapid dissemination of Auto-Tuned songs on YouTube is fundamentally different from opera in one important way.”

Serenata, a three-day event on the Dorset coast, is billed as Britain’s first outdoor classical music festival. There are multiple stages, core classical and crossover artists, booths selling burgers and curries, tents collapsing in high winds, and lots and lots of mud. Just like Glastonbury.

“With an international cast from the Arabic-speaking world and new [bilingual] texts adapted from the 3,000 pages of original stories by Lebanese writer Hanan Al Shaykh, [director Tim] Supple is hoping to ‘smash the clichés that exist, the distortions that exist’.”