‘The Awful Movie Everyone Wants To See’

“Unusually for a midnight-movie favorite, The Room contains no flesh-eating ghouls, no polygamous devil cults and no time-traveling transvestites. It is essentially a domestic drama … The actual film, though, is like a Koch snowflake of badness, wherein any scene has an infinite number of things wrong with it … But The Room rises above garden-variety awful for a number of reasons.”

How To Make A Mess Onstage

“The sets of four new [Off-Broadway] shows – That Face; This Wide Night; The Metal Children; and Oliver Parker! – look like something out of an episode of TV’s Hoarders. … The set designers of all four shows recently spoke about their inspirations and the meticulous work it takes to get a set to look perfectly grubby.”

Italy’s Opera House Honchos In Bid To Prevent Budget Cuts

“Today the directors of all 14 opera houses will hold a crunch meeting with Sandro Bondi, the Culture Minister, in a last effort to stave off the cuts,” which the government says are necessary as “part of a package of austerity measures. … But for performers and legions of opera lovers, what is at stake is an art form that is a symbol of Italy throughout the world.”

Case Of The Missing Oscar: Where Is Hattie McDaniel’s?

“It belongs to Howard University’s theater department, which has spent years trying to figure out what happened to the Oscar that disappeared decades ago…. Howard archivists say there’s no official record that the university ever received the award,” the first given to an African American, yet “former students vividly recall seeing it.”