Canada’s Stratford Festival may have the bigger budget and the better-known name, Tony Brown concedes. “But I still prefer the almost always-invigorating work done at the Shaw Festival, in the twee-little village of Niagara-on-the-Lake in the wine-producing region just north of Niagara Falls. The Shaw Festival is smaller — it spends $20 million a year, has 68 actors and is staging 10 shows this summer in three theaters — but it is smarter by a country kilometer.”
Tag: 7.30.06
In Healthier Dance World, Are Drugs Still A Danger?
“In American dance a new athleticism has joined artistry at center stage. At the same time performing-arts medicine has matured, and its practitioners now recognize dancers as not only creative artists but also as world-class athletes whose art form seems to demand greater challenges each season. But as dancers jump higher, spin faster and try to stay impossibly thin, might they, like baseball stars and Olympic sprinters, be susceptible to new drug regimens? Performance-enhancing drugs, no longer the realm of musclemen, could also have applications for dancers.”
Branding As Countercultural Creativity
“Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?” For thousands of young people, the answer is yes. “Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.”
A New Element To Bollywood Marriages: Realism
“Increasingly realistic portrayals of marriage — happy and otherwise — are very much on the mind of Bollywood these days. … There are no national records available, but experts agree that divorce rates have risen significantly. Over the years much news-media coverage has been devoted to urban stress, the new empowered Indian woman, the phenomena known as DINK (double income no kids) and DINS (double income no sex), the emergence of marriage counseling and of course high-profile celebrity break-ups. ‘Beyond a point,’ said the director Rajat Kapoor, ‘we couldn’t look away from the reality of modern marriage.'”
Disabled Soldiers Given Voice Through Theatre
In a small town in Maine, the Wounded Warriors Writers’ Program has set out to teach disabled veterans how to tell their stories in the theatre. “The dozen men and women, age 20 to 48, served in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. From around the country they have gathered for 10 days in this coastal town to translate their life experiences into scenes and monologues for the stage.”
Kander Goes On With The Show, Minus Ebb
Since the 2004 death of lyricist Fred Ebb, composer John Kander has kept working on a musical the duo had been writing. It’s due to open Aug. 9 in Los Angeles. “A backstage musical and murder mystery combined, ‘Curtains’ is a whodunit in more than one sense of the word. It may also be the last new work to be produced on this scale from Kander and Ebb, one of Broadway’s best composer-lyricist teams. And while that fact alone won’t likely spell curtains for the American musical, it’s certainly a sign that generational change is waiting in the wings.”
Three Years, 60 Million Copies, And One Movie Later …
“Simmered by three years of lawsuits, religious debates and conspiracy theories, brought to a boil in May by the Hollywood movie, the craze for all things ‘Da Vinci Code’ is finally fading, publishers and booksellers agree.”
No Author Photo? Maybe There’s No Author.
Before James Frey and JT LeRoy, there was Vicki Johnson, who claimed to be the adoptive mother of a boy dying of AIDS. Too sick to meet anyone, ever, the boy nonetheless published an autobiography, sans author photo. Writer Armistead Maupin, who befriended the teen without ever actually laying eyes on him, was only one of Johnson’s many celebrity dupes.
Smithsonian To Pay Hip-Hop Its Due
Hip-Hop, an American art form that went global long ago, might seem an odd fit with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, but planning for a major exhibition on hip-hop culture is under way there.