“Ever more voices are suggesting that Shakespearean text be adjusted for modern audiences, with the most artistically responsible attempts so far being ones where only words and phrases that truly impede understanding are judiciously replaced by modern ones.”
Tag: 05.15.16
She Invented Hollywood Gossip Reporting And Has Been Mostly Forgotten, But She Has No Regrets
“Over the course of her 40 years in the gossip industry, Barrett became known as a ball-buster, an indefatigable reporter, and a legitimate pioneer. Her name has faded from national consciousness, yet her innovations remain: She was Barbara Walters and Nikki Finke and TMZ all rolled into one, and she did it first.”
The Young Dramaturgs
“‘Once I bring myself to rehearsal,’ thinks the young dramaturg, ‘what if I fail? What if someone stumps me? What if I don’t know how a late nineteenth-century Russian family would have eaten pierogie [as a big pie, by the way], or the year the Berlin Wall went up [1961]?'”
The Singer That Arthur Godfrey Fired Live On The Air Has Died At 86
“[Julius] La Rosa was in the Navy when Godfrey heard him sing and invited him to appear on his CBS TV show. After his discharge, Mr. La Rosa became a star of Godfrey’s show from 1951 to 1953, recording several hits including ‘Eh, Cumpari.’ Godfrey liked to exert control over his entertainers, making demands and restricting their outside work in return for exposure on his popular show.”
Can The Ticket Resale Racket Be Stopped?
“Most ordinary fans simply don’t stand a chance. Within seconds of an event going on sale, the tickets are harvested in their thousands by a small but ruthlessly efficient army of touts, many using multiple credit cards to bypass the limit on the number of tickets that one person can purchase.”
Stanley Kubrick’s Assistant Finally Starts Talking
“I didn’t have any interest in film, I was just interested in racing. After about two months of working for his company, I still didn’t know who Stanley Kubrick was. When [we were finally introduced], I saw this person who looked like Fidel Castro and didn’t realize who he was. I thought, ‘Oh dear, here we go.'”
What Do The Tate Modern’s Architects Say About Their New Expansion?
“Their Tate extension, which is partly a new building and partly the adaptation of previously inaccessible parts of the old power station, enlarges the already-not-small institution’s floor area by 60%. At £260m and nine years in the making, it will have cost more in time, money and agony than the first version.”
CBS Was Going To Get A Nancy Drew Show, But Then Too Many Women Liked It
“The reason for the nix? Apparently, ‘the pilot tested well but skewed too female for CBS’ schedule.'”
Could You Survive Without Your CDs?
“The Herculean task of searching through the rack, putting a disc in a machine, ejecting it to wipe the fingerprint that made it skip through track two and then putting it into the machine again felt so arduous in this new world that it may as well have predated the industrial revolution.”
Science Fiction Appears To Be Converging With, Well, Now
“The possibility that sci-fi could be breaking in favor of the near-future is especially surprising, given that prophetic boldness has often been seen as one of the genre’s signal features. If, as the critic Northrop Frye has argued, the job of science fiction has been ‘to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery,’ what does it mean that so much recent sci-fi has been taking place on a plane that’s relatively proximate to ours?”