“Her hair is white, her gait a tad unsteady, and she underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer in 2006 and 2007, but her build is still solid, her skin firm, her voice strong, her eyes twinkling, and her cancer gone. When she comes out on stage, she’s used to dominating it, even if her performance these days is devoted less to the operas of Rossini and more to singing the praises of her three grandchildren, Daisy, Henry and Alex.”
“Ballet has for centuries been taught by its high priests like a sacred mystery, shut off from medical analysis of its principles. Given the horrendously high rate of injury it seems to entail (mostly related to repetitive strain rather than sudden accident), isn’t it time that a comprehensive review, informed by modern physiology, was made of its theories and practices?”
“The true threat to HBO and the cable business model is that NetFlix can transcend the television itself, offering you shows on all your devices.”
“As the researchers predicted, inflated praise led children with low self-esteem to choose the less-challenging assignments. For children with high self-esteem, it had the opposite effect, increasing the likelihood they’d pick the more difficult task.”
“Women still tell me they find orchestras can be hostile, can undermine them deliberately, that executive directors can be sceptical.”
Christians have forced the cancellation of play at a Northern Ireland theatre because it supposedly mocks the Bible, it has emerged.
“While those born in the Sixties may cling to notions of pop’s ‘importance’, younger generations appear far less obsessive or even interested. Many argue that computer games, the internet and social media have filled the gap where buying vinyl and the music weeklies used to be.”
“The most exciting music being created today is not the product of a single compositional aesthetic or the work of just one segment of the population. (Pick your prejudice and throw it away.) It cannot be contained geographically or be hermetically sealed up in impenetrable genre boxes.”
“Some concerts are drawn from a self-produced season that musicians put together. Others were assembled from scratch. Neu said that he, CEO Michael Henson and a group of musicians worked on the program.”
“At $24 per person, the new museum will be in the same league as the Museum of Modern Art ($25) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (suggested admission of $25). That’s some stiff competition for an institution that has a very focused subject: the terrorist attacks of 1993 and 2001.”
“The South Bay’s major resident dance company, which has long struggled with its finances, announced Thursday that it will cut its sparsely attended Saturday matinees as well as replace its substitute recorded music for a live orchestra at its Feb. 14-16 performances.”
“Reports by an independent panel of assessors suggest that the Abbey is struggling to meet its aim of being a world-class theatre. The assessors, appointed jointly by the Arts Council and the Abbey Theatre itself, gave just four of 12 productions marks that would rank them as very good.”
“Arts Council England is to introduce new conditions on funding that would force its national portfolio organisations to share their audience data.”
South Korea’s Masan Robot Land in Incheon – “whose English motto is ‘Fun & Fantasy with Robot! – will celebrate science fiction cyborgs and androids while also promoting popular interest in the robotics industry and robot culture.”
“Former WhatsOnStage chief Terri Paddock has spoken out for the first time about her shock departure from the theatre website at the end of last year, describing it as ‘sudden and unexpected’. She said she had asked solicitors to pursue legal action on her behalf.”
Okay, not the precious bodily fluids obsession, and not the part about Slim Pickens astride a nuclear missile, but beyond that …
“[He] discussed his methodology, corrected a lawyer on the pronunciation of the artist Robert Rauschenberg’s name and said, quite firmly, that he had never authorized a foundry owner to reproduce one of his famous works depicting the American flag.”
David O. Russell (I ♥ Huckabees, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) and scriptwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) have been commissioned for 13 episodes of “an upstairs/downstairs soap centered on a private country club.” (And this will be for network television rather than cable.)
The Cutty Sark, in drydock on the Thames in Greenwich, will continue being a historical exhibit by day, “but by night it will become an 85-seat theatre intended to showcase cabaret, music, lectures, small-scale drama and local performers.”
“In the documentaries [about the West Memphis Three] many of the characters implicate themselves by virtue of the fact that they’re performing for a documentary camera … And I felt that dramatically, using professional actors you could actually achieve a degree of naturalism that maybe in a documentary [you can’t, because] there’s always an agenda.” (audio)
“Many people then, and quite a few people now, want to read books that make them feel good, make them feel happy. … I didn’t understand that you read books in order to feel that the world is better than it is, and so I was offending without really understanding it for quite a while.”
Or, alternatively, Aristotle Recommended These Three Elements for a Great Story, And Here’s How to Balance Them to Get a Hit.