In the refurbished Globe Theatre (an exact replica of the theatre where the Bard’s works were all premiered) is becoming one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions. More than 1,000 visitors go each day to see “Elizabethan special effects brought to life on touch screens: See how Ariel flew. Check out what Shakespeare used for onstage blood and how Macbeth’s thunder was created.” – Yahoo! News (Reuters)
Tag: 08.01.00
THREE DECADES OF THEATRE
Theatre critic Benedict Nightingale reflects on 35 years of attending the Edinburgh Festival. “Unpredictability is the essence of Edinburgh. If I have seen plenty of chic schlock there – Stein, Sellars and Robert Wilson at their most overrated – I have also seen plenty that stays with me still. And here let’s agree that the distinction between Festival and Fringe is often slim.” – The Times (UK)
DOES THEATER NEED BORDERS?
The issue of whether to launch a National Theatre of Scotland has been bandied about for decades, but now that Scottish Parliament is taking the notion seriously and discussing possible funding, the debate has reached a new pitch. “The issue of whether ‘National’ equates with ‘quality’ is a potent question.” – The Herald (Scotland)
THE COMPLICATIONS OF LOVE AND HATE
“Any number of classical music lovers will tell you with glee of the bad pieces they love to hate. But people who will tell you about pieces they hate to love, but love anyway, are somewhat more rare. Saying you’ve got a thing for Brahms’ Hungarian Dances Nos. 4 and 5, for instance, especially if you’ve ever gone anywhere near a music school, is particularly dangerous – but only if you mean it sincerely. Irony does exist in classical music, but it’s mostly in the ears of cynical (younger) beholders.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
BETTER THAN BLEEPING?
It’s common practice today for record labels to create “clean versions” of albums with explicit lyrics, and some companies even ask artists to re-record versions without profanity. “”It’s getting like we almost have a McCarthyism in the business, but the censorship isn’t new; what’s new is the fear and the compliance going on to this extent. And I think a lot of artists go along with it because they’re afraid of being lost in the corporate shuffle and falling out of favor with their labels.” – New York Times
UNFAIR HEARING
Turns out those infrared enhanced-hearing headsets provided by theatres for hearing-impaired patrons are the perfect bootleggers tool. “Bootleggers can simply request an ALD headset, which provides a high-quality feed of a live show via a low-level FM frequency broadcast inside a facility. The music pirates then steal the headset feed, giving them concert performances devoid of the usual bootleg problems such as random crowd noise or distortion.” – Seattle Times (AP)
WOMEN’S WORK
This weekend’s British premiere of composer Judith Weir’s newest work, “woman.life.song,” is an unusual event in the world of classical music – the piece was conceived and written by women, and is based entirely on women’s life issues. The song-cycle is a collaborative effort among Weir, soprano Jessye Norman, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, and Jungian psychoanalyst and mythologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes. – The Guardian
WILLIAM MAXWELL DIED —
— at age 91 on Monday. Accomplished novelist and revered editor at the “New Yorker” for 40 years, Maxwell honed the prose of some of this century’s finest American writers, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and Harold Brodkey among them. – CNN
INFOBERG
- Writers are upset about Contentville, which went online July 5. The site offers “books, articles, TV transcripts and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95 each,” but “some publishers are shocked at Contentville’s chutzpa. The Village Voice says it licensed EBSCO to use content for educational and research purposes. ‘It’s outrageously unethical. Nobody ever dreamed of this. It’s just gross.'” – Feed
AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY KUNITZ, —
- — the new U.S. poet laureate. First published more than 70 years ago, Kunitz, now 95, has won almost every poetry award (including the Nobel in 1959 to the National Book Award in 1995), although he’s only published a handful of books. “I write poems only when I cannot escape them, when it is so urgent I will sacrifice everything else to do it.” A new Kunitz collection is due out next year. – NPR [Real audio file]