Irene Lewis, “who has guided Baltimore’s venerable company for nearly two decades, surprised her staff yesterday, saying that she will no longer provide artistic leadership after next season. The announcement signifies a major shift in direction for a troupe that once enjoyed a national reputation for producing daring new shows and reimagining classics, but that in recent years has become less prominent.”
Tag: 04.28.10
When Boca Raton Was A Japanese-American Kibbutz
“In 1903, 29-year-old Japanese pioneer and recent NYU graduate Jo Sakai had a notion. He would gather together a small band of enthusiasts, investors, and hangers-on, he told the Jacksonville Board of Trade. Together, they would grow pineapples and rearrange a little piece of America based on utopian ideals and Japanese know-how.”
Bart Simpson Nails The Response To The South Park/Mohammed Situation
For the opening title sequence of last week’s episode of The Simpsons, the writers and producers slipped in a potent rejoinder to the dust-up over the way South Park did-or-didn’t depict the Prophet of Islam. The sentence that Bart is shown writing on the blackboard 100 times was different than usual …
Mermaid Diplomacy Or Trafficking In Women? Denmark Sends Its Most Famous Statue To China
“Denmark’s best-known national emblem, the four-foot-tall bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, [has been moved] from the rocky, quayside location it has occupied since 1913 to a site in Shanghai … [where it] will be the centerpiece of the Danish pavilion in Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo.”
Making Moby-Dick For The Opera Stage
For its premiere at Dallas Opera, the “mise-en-scène incorporates both traditional stage spectacle and the latest in 21st-century opera-house technology. So audiences can watch the crew of the Pequod (singers as well as expert climbers) scamper up rigging. And, thanks to projections on those big sails, they can also savor the whaler’s long journey from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific.”
Clap Your Hands If You Believe (It Might Help)
“In a test conducted by researchers from the University of Cologne, participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a ‘lucky ball’ sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren’t told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement. The results suggest new thinking in how to view luck and are intriguing to [behavioral] psychologists.”
An Author Joins The Boycott Of Arizona
“One single author declining to attend a weekend workshop will not make much of a dent in Arizona’s economic status; it is bound to more deeply affect her own. Which is perhaps what makes it notable.”
Huntington Library Gives A Glimpse Of Its Bukowski Papers
“Among the exhibit’s highlights will be hand-corrected literary drafts, rare first editions and photographs that offer glimpses of the writer’s personal life. Also on display will be Bukowski’s manual typewriter and annotated racing forms that reveal his system for betting.”
Thomas H. Connell III, Longtime Met Opera Stage Manager, Dies at 67
“Mr. Connell spent the past three decades in a crucial though unsung job that requires the combined abilities of a musician, linguist, conjurer, computer whiz, psychotherapist and animal wrangler.”
Preparing For World Expo, Shanghai Hides All The Bootleg DVDs
“The latest mystery in Shanghai, complete with sliding bookshelves, secret passageways and contraband goods, is this: Why are all the popular DVDs and CDs missing from this city’s shops?” As a matter of fact, they aren’t missing at all …