“Tryouts for Fox’s high school musical Glee will be televised on the cable channel Oxygen next year. In a deal outlined on Tuesday, Oxygen will start a Glee casting-call reality show in June 2011 as part of a broader deal with Twentieth Television to show repeats of Glee in syndication beginning in 2013.”
Tag: 06.30.10
Trevor Nunn Slams Cameron Mackintosh Over Les Miz Revival
When Mackintosh decided to produce a 25th-anniversary touring production of the blockbuster musical, he bypassed Nunn (who directed the original production) entirely in favor of two younger directors. Mackintosh says he wanted “a new production that reflected the contemporary appeal of the musical today”; Nunn insists that the touring show is not a “new production” at all, but rather a slight adaptation of his work.
Is Lady Gaga A Fit Subject For Philosophy?
One reader “is so outraged that the profession of philosophy would accommodate my reflecting on Lady Gaga, nay, my going so far as to write a book called How to Do Things With Pornography, that he called for the discipline itself to ‘vanish in the stampede toward majors in technology and business’.” Nancy Bauer explains herself.
David Duchovny To Make (Professional) Stage Debut
The star of the TV series The X-Files and Californication did his only theater work early in his career, in the small-scale “showcase” plays whose actors are lucky if they get paid enough for a taxi ride home. (He describes the shows as “Not professional. Very unprofessional.”) Now MCC Theater in New York has cast Duchovny in the lead of Neil LaBute’s new play, The Break of Noon, which opens this fall.
Soweto Choreographer Creates Street Dance For World Cup
“The dance begins easily enough, with a knock-kneed jump. Then a series of soccer kicks, a sideways prance, a thrusting pump, a backward kick as your eyes follow an imaginary ball overhead. From there it gets complicated, until the final move, a diagonal kick, shooting for an imaginary goal.”
“It’s Going To Be A Whitman Freak-Out Jam By The Waterfront”
Brooklyn’s own Walt Whitman “will get an all-star tribute in his own former backyard on Thursday when dozens of artists, rockers and writers convene in the new Brooklyn Bridge Park for an evening-long Walt-a-palooza called ‘I Do Not Doubt I am Limitless: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn’.”
Lit By India’s Dalits (‘Untouchables’) Enters Mainstream
“Having long been confined to writing only in their own, local languages and largely ignored by the literary mainstream, Dalit authors are now being swooped on by some of the country’s biggest publishers, such as Radhakrishna Prakashan which is translating their work into Hindi, the lingua franca of northern India and beyond.”
Disaster Drama Takes The Stage — But How?
“We are familiar with storms in Shakespeare, and Ibsen was fond of a near-unstageable disaster direction or two – see ‘the avalanche buries him, filling the whole valley’ from Brand. But how do writers and directors stage a response to contemporary natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina?”
How To Tackle The Classics On Your Summer Vacation
On audiobook, Laura Miller advises. “Listening is less work than reading from a page; it feels like a treat rather than an assignment, and treats are what vacations are all about. If your attention goes a little out of focus during a long paragraph of 19th-century landscape description, who’s to know?”
Chinese Painter Wu Guanzhong Dies at 90
“Mr. Wu’s education and career were constantly disrupted by war and political turmoil,” as when he was forced to do hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. In more recent years, “Mr. Wu won recognition as one of China’s most original artists and became a darling of Asian and Western collectors. In 2009 his works fetched nearly $40 million at auction.”