“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.” And those celebrity statements have inspired conspiracy theories from both sides of Venezuela’s political divide.
Archives for March 6, 2014
Watching ‘The Act of Killing’ in Indonesia
Just this past weekend, The New York Times ran an article on how Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning documentary about the massacres after Indonesia’s failed 1965 coup is having little visible effect in Indonesia itself. Here another author describes a screening in Yogyakarta and suggests that the film is having a quiet but powerful effect in the country.
Sean Potts, Co-Founder of The Chieftains, Dead at 83
A virtuoso of the humble tin whistle, Potts joined Paddy Moloney and colleagues in 1962 to join the group that went on to become global megastars of Irish folk music.
Amid the Chaos, There’s One Italian Opera House That’s Actually Functional
That’s Turin’s Teatro Regio, “where performances increased to 110 in 2012 from 85 in 2005, even with a reduction in staff. Its orchestra and chorus have also just announced an ambitious North American tour.” And there’s one individual who seems to deserve a lot of the credit.
Mediums and Spiritualists as Theatre Artists
Using Angela Lansbury’s upcoming West End turn as Madame Arcati as a jumping-off point, Lyn Gardner looks at the theatrical techniques and elements used by the early-20th-century séance conjurers who inspired Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
‘The Tension Between Taylor Swift’s Legs and the Arctic Melt Is Not Just a Journalistic Problem, It’s a Problem for Our Society’
So said Alain de Botton in a talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about the way we consume news today.
RSC’s ‘Wolf Hall’/’Bring Up the Bodies’ Headed to West End
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s two-part staging of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII have been playing to packed houses in Stratford-upon-Avon since December.
‘The Best Six Months of My Writing Life’: Hilary Mantel on Putting Her Cromwell Novels Onstage
“I’ve had so much inspiration from what happens on stage night by night – and I’ve understood things that I don’t think I did understand before about the characters.”