Documenting The Cardinal On Stage

A new play in Chicago turns Boston Cardinal Bernard Law’s testimony about the priest sexual abuse case into drama. “Part of the power of ‘Sin’ comes from its being strictly documentary. Michael Murphy, a playwright who lives in California, distilled it from the 11,000 pages of Cardinal Law’s depositions and from hundreds of newspaper articles. He took some dramatic liberties, like condensing the dozen lawyers who questioned Cardinal Law into just two, but did not add any dialogue.”

The End Of Photography? Not!

So David Hockney has declared the end of photography. Oh really? asks Joel Sternfeld, winner of the Citigroup photography prize: “The Hockney argument is as simplistic as saying that any non-fiction book is truthful. You can never lose sight of the fact that it’s authored. With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: what do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?”

Long-Unseen Boticelli Goes On Display

A long unseen Botticelli is among a collection of the master’s work that goes on display in Florence this month. It’s being called the largest show of the painter’s work ever mounted. “The never previously displayed masterpiece is the last of four panels that make up one of Botticelli’s most disturbing works – The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti.”

Tommasini: Wait Weight, Don’t Tell Me

Anthony Tommasini is “flabbergasted by the decision of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London to drop the soprano Deborah Voigt from a new production of Strauss’s ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ in June because she was deemed too heavy for a slinky black dress that is central to the director’s concept of the role. The company’s move is so appalling that you have to wonder whether there is more to the story.”