Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater has been getting a lot of negative reviews from the city’s largest daily lately. So in a clear shot across the paper’s bow, the theater took out a full-page ad in last Sunday’s editions, and used the space to reprint a nearly complete review of their latest production – from a rival paper’s critic.
Tag: 01.31.08
Peacekeepers Vandalize Prehistoric Paintings
“Spectacular prehistoric depictions of animal and human figures created up to 6,000 years ago on Western Saharan rocks have been vandalised by United Nations peacekeepers.”
Sarah Jessica Parker To Do Project Runway Of The Art World
The show, which may or may not feature executive producer Parker onscreen, will feature 12 aspiring artists creating original works to be judged.
Amazon To Buy Audible.com
Audible has about 80,000 audio programs comprising almost 200,000 hours, and is the exclusive distributor of spokenword audio to iTunes, owned by one of Amazon’s competitors, Apple.
Bolshoi Won’t Reopen Till Late 2009
The crumbing theatre was closed in 2005. “The restoration was initially due to cost 15 billion roubles ($610 million) and finish later this year. But last year engineers found the structure was more than 75 percent unstable and pushed back opening night indefinitely.”
Star Tenor Felled By Fish Bone
“Star tenor Juan Diego Florez has been forced to cancel all performances in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Rossini’s ‘Il Barbiere di Siviglia’ because of a throat infection caused by a swallowed fishbone.”
Will Springer Opera Make It To Broadway?
“My guess: It won’t happen. Though an accomplished, entertaining, musically sophisticated and dramatically uncompromising look at American culture at its freakiest, the opera (and it is an opera, more than Les Miserables) is the victim of its own ambition and passing fads.”
The Poetry Of Youth
“We don’t actually want kids to be fully-fledged artists, stretching out language with all the weight of experience, often biting down on the bitter gall of that experience to give us something both astounding and unsettling. If a child were to write Lady Lazarus you’d faint. What we fall for in the verse of poets not yet in double digits is seldom the strength of their work but more often their ingenuous charm.”
The Man Who Made The Royal Academy Sing
Norman Rosenthal “turned a place whose membership and traditions give it a massive leaning towards the conservative into a world-class, influential venue for exhibitions of contemporary art. In the 1980s his show A New Spirit in Painting made stars of a generation of neo-expressionists and defined the taste of the time. He achieved the same thing for the 1990s with Sensation.”
Study: Rich Chicago Musical Life Underperforms
“What’s to blame? For starters, a splintered, fiercely independent music community, venues scattered all over the map, and a tradition of hostile relations with local officials. Most cities that are known as music destinations have government music offices that market that identity. Chicago does not.”