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- The 1980s Centered A Neon-Colored End Of The World, And Now It’s All Coming To A Theatre Near You
Revisiting the 1980s, a decade whose “reality pulsed with cultural Balkanization, financial erosion, systemic disinvestment, and televised neurosis, the American theatre conjures a cultural imagination crowded with the outsiders, monsters, con artists, hungry things, and chosen kindred of the analog twilight.” – American Theatre
- An Appreciation For Kanya King, Who Changed And ‘Revolutionized’ Black British Culture
The founder of the Mobo Awards was “engaging, self-effacing, funny, modest. Someone with so much to brag about but who was so humble. Her superpower, it turns out, was kindness and warmth.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Four Musicals That Are Counting On Broadway Shows Finally Turning A Corner
“There’s a big reason it takes years for a fresh musical to land on Broadway. Cracking any story is a painstaking process. The same goes for crafting a songbook. Getting the two to coalesce? It’s a delicate alchemy.” – Washington Post (Yahoo)
- Who’s Going To Win At The Tonys Tonight?
Can Jellicle Ball beat out the universally loved Ragtime? Will Lesley Manville’s British chops beat out Susannah Flood’s incredible performance in Liberation? Find out soon! – Vulture
- Gut Punch
(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949).
In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.”
His piece concludes:
Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, shortchanging the medium’s potential. Why pat people on the back when what they really need — and what live performance is uniquely poised to deliver — is a punch to the gut?
What went wrong? His argument that in a response to theatre audiences claiming to be turned off by being “preached at” by the plays they attended on Broadway (and I can’t blame them), there has been a turn to the safe, the comforting, the pat on the back.
Five years ago, a lot of new theater was in a less indulgent mood. As the industry awoke in 2021 from pandemic shutdowns, many playwrights and producers were eager to champion the values of the social justice movement set off by the killing of George Floyd the previous spring. Works, often written by nonwhite artists, challenged audiences to face up to their latent biases — no matter how well intentioned they might have assumed they were as theater-loving liberals.
In New York there came a wave of shows that pushed boundaries and prodded progressive audiences. “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’s incendiary dark comedy about race and desire, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2019, returned for an encore engagement. “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s hall-of-mirrors musical about a fat Black queer playwright grappling with his own subjectivity, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for best musical. A slew of plays, including new works like Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” an urban parable partly inspired by “Waiting for Godot,” and Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” about the interrogation of an N.S.A. whistle-blower, as well as revivals by Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange and Alice Childress, crowded Broadway stages.
Those theater-loving liberals, thinking they are well intentioned, needed some prodding.
But now?
The Tony Awards race is dominated by plays that are more affirming than confrontational, offering the sort of benign provocation unlikely to keep people awake at night or wonder why they paid good money to feel unsettled. …
This spring, we have Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s reliable elegy to the downtrodden working class.
Which is quite a dismissal of a play that is rightly seen as an American classic.
I think Mr. Kumar gives the game away in his discussion of Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt. Here is the entire discussion of this play:
Then there’s John Lithgow (competing against Mr. Lane for best actor), with his sour and prickly turn as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a fiery topical debate lightly outfitted as a drama. The play, which premiered in London in 2024, finds Dahl mired in public controversy over a review he wrote about Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried,” which documents Israel’s 1982 siege of Lebanon. As the play begins, Dahl’s essay has been denounced as antisemitic, and his editor and an emissary from his publisher, both Jewish, arrive to seek a public comment that will calm the waters before the release of his next book, “The Witches.”
The play, which quickly recouped its Broadway investment, raises two major questions, to my mind. One is why we continue to insist on making art about terrible men. The other is this: Does “Giant” succeed in dramatizing the interplay between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or does it flatten that debate because Dahl is so obviously a grotesque bigot? Mr. Lithgow’s performance is a kinetic marvel, but there’s no question that his Dahl is a snarling and even gleeful hater of Jews.
The cynical view would be that “Giant” seeks to validate the anxiety, including among some supporters of Israel, that those who oppose its state actions must also be antisemitic. The less cynical view would be that all of this makes “Giant,” at the very least, a less interesting play for simply offering up an obvious villain.
So, a play about an author of very popular (though, to my mind, very uneven in quality) children’s books is shown to be a terrible person (there had already been a lot of published accounts to this effect), and that in itself is not prodding enough. Instead, the problem is that Dahl is shown to be anti-Israel but not in the right way, such that somebody who supports Israel, and is a bit dense, might think this play is validating. A better option, I guess, would be a play about someone who opposes the actions of the Israeli state but is more palatable, maybe who has a River-to-the-Sea poster but does not take it literally, and who has a Jewish friend, or some such?
In other words, Mr. Kumar wants plays that pat him on the back, for his proper views on political and social issues, and that give gut punches to those superficial theater-going liberals who secretly harbor views that are not quite radical enough. He wants plays with his politics; it’s those audiences, you know the type, that need to be “challenged.” His “worldview” doesn’t need changing.
Are pats on the back and gut punches the only options? What about plays that are just about being human, where at the end of the play you would have no idea whether a character was a Trump or anti-Trump voter, or anything about their views on defunding the police, or the two-state solution? Plays about falling in love, falling out of love, unrequited love? About dealing with the consequences of a terrible decision? About friendship, and betrayal? About a particularly dramatic historical event, where the cast do not wear hats with a G if they are a goodie and with a B if they are a baddie? Where a group cast does not seem like it was chosen for a Pew Research Center focus group? Where the play is just laugh out loud funny? That have not obviously been wrought with granting agencies and foundations foremost in mind?
Better than a knuckle sandwich.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Anthony Stewart Head, Star Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer And Ted Lasso, Has Died At 72
“One of his most formative experiences, he said, was seeing Tim Curry in the musical The Rocky Horror Show while in drama school as a teenager. He told The Guardian that it ‘ignited something in my core.’” – The New York Times
- The Story Of Hong Kong’s Popular Music Can Tell The Tale Of The City’s History
Cantopop is “predominantly Hong Kong music that blends Chinese and western pop sensibilities.” – The Guardian (UK)
- A New Edith Wharton Story Highlights The Human Inability To Deal With War
“The story, on two typed and undated manuscripts that appeared to be different drafts, centers on a dinner party hosted at the same table where, earlier in the war, an army surgeon had performed amputations.” – The New York Times
- Mary Shelley’s Sisters
“Fanny’s few surviving letters testify to her interests in poetry, education, art history, literature, current affairs, social politics, and the wellbeing of her extended family. … She counted Aaron Burr (former USA vice president), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), Humphry Davy (scientist), [and] Charles and Mary Lamb (writers)” as acquaintances. – LitHub
- Two And A Half Centuries On, Someone May Have Figured Out The Mystery Of The Declaration Of Independence
Pretty cool: “Scholars have identified about 17 distinct broadside editions created in print shops across the colonies in July and August 1776, usually in runs of hundreds of copies.” One was anonymous – but perhaps not anymore. – The New York Times
- The UK’s Heirloom Ceramics Sector Is In Deep Trouble
“The UK ceramics sector employs 20,000 people, half of them in the West Midlands, and is regarded as an indispensable to the economy” – but repeated blows are breaking even the ceramics for the defense sector. – The Guardian (UK)
- AJ Chronicles: A New Policy to Eliminate Arguments for the Arts
This notion that the ultimate measure of American educational value is economic is an impoverishing one. We measure for success. If that measure is earnings then we optimize for earnings. Social value measured on an earnings scale doesn’t just get deprioritized, it doesn’t exist. - California And Other States Are Possibly Suing To Block The Warner Bros. And Paramount Deal
One advocate for the lawsuit: “The consequences would be felt nationwide, from destroying CNN the way that Ellisons have devastated CBS to entertainment industry job losses and consumers losing access to independent voices and a competitive market.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- The French Open Finals Courts Get Choreographed Ballet Dances For Some Reason
Choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, no less. “Tennis doesn’t have a strong tradition of opening numbers — and certainly not of dance routines.” – The New York Times
- The Movie Cars Ruined Pixar
“Pixar plummeted to the ground with such a force that I began to question my undying devotion to an animation studio. Could my beloved Pixar, which had already anthropomorphized so many things, really make something so upsetting and perplexing, and on so many levels?” – Salon
- A Century On, Martha Graham’s Modern Dance Vision Still Matters Intensely
“Her choreography landed like a bomb in a landscape where vaudeville and ballet ruled the day.” – The New York Times
- Why Is There No Tony For Best Wigs?
Weird: “There’s an Oscar and an Emmy. I’ve been nominated for Emmys for TV stuff. Theater is literally the only area in our industry that does not acknowledge us.” – Vulture
- What Marjane Satrapi Did For Iranian Women
“Satrapi was a spokesperson for our trauma, our upbringing and our particular flavour of shame, repression and outspokenness. She made us legible to our western peers in our 20s and 30s, and I was sure she would do it again in middle age.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Kennedy Center’s Lawsuit Against Musician Who Refused To Play Christmas Eve Is Tossed Out
“The judge, Tanya M. Jones Bosier, wrote that the Kennedy Center failed to prove that Chuck Redd, a jazz musician and a host of the institution’s holiday program, had signed a contract to perform as he had in years past.” – The New York Times
- The Effort To Save The Kennedy Center From This President Is Far From Over
“Fundamental questions about the institution’s leadership, finances, and artistic direction remain in flux. ‘It’s not clear if there’s any money to stay open with. … And it’s also not clear who’s going to be in charge.’” – The Atlantic
- The education is only worth what you earn?
Good morning. Here are this week’s highlights:
In Washington, the Education Department moved to cancel student loans for nearly every college arts program and to judge schools by their graduates’ earnings (The New York Times) — a logic that values an arts education purely by what its graduates later earn. Meanwhile, a loose symposium of writers spent the week worrying the opposite question: what is the human part of creative work actually worth, given that it’s the one part a machine can’t reproduce?
Neuroscience suggests “semantic knowledge” — the internal map of how concepts connect — is the precondition for genuine invention, and it’s what no AI model possesses (Neuroscience News). But how can you tell whether something has been written by AI? The Atlantic proposes that it’s the absence of human friction: prose that’s too clean, too even, “simultaneously breezy and grandiose” (The Atlantic). And as computers increasingly talk to computers, another writer asks whether we’re quietly surrendering our autonomy — typing into the box and waiting (The Atlantic).
So we’re working out how to define and defend the irreducibly human contribution to art and creativity at the precise moment our government is reclassifying it as a bad financial bet. One side measures art by its earnings; the other suspects the value was never in the output at all.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
Doug
- Andrew Joslyn talks about the unique impact of relevant programming for orchestras
Andrew Joslyn, Associate Director of Popular Programming at the Seattle Symphony, shares the unique impact of relevant programming in building community.
- Meet One Of The American Revolution’s Leading Composers, William Billings
The self-taught composer, who lived in Boston during the revolution years, published six books of music, with over 340 choral works. In addition to the Psalm settings and fuguing tunes he’s remembered for today, he wrote what may be America’s first protest song — in response to the Boston Massacre of 1770. – The Conversation
- YouTubers Invade This Summer’s Movie Theatre Screens
- Lucinda Childs On How She Keeps Her Working Pace After More Than 50 Years
“I just feel fortunate. I’m still running around and everybody keeps reminding me that I’m 85. I don’t think about that so much. I do work every day. I work out every day. … It’s the first thing I do and that sort of keeps me together physically.” – The Brooklyn Rail
- Good AI? Model Proposes Thousands Of Designs, Test Them, Then Adapts
The AI model proposed study designs, and robots carried them out and fed the data back to the model for the next round. Humans set the goal, and the machines did much of the work in the lab, cutting the cost of producing a desired protein by 40 percent. – Singularity Hub
- Lessons From The Enhanced Games
Trying to break world records remains a high-risk, high-reward strategy for Enhanced. The event proved that breaking records is incredibly difficult, even with PEDs and technological enhancements such as swimming supersuits, both banned in traditional sport. – The Conversation
- If You Don’t Use AI It’s Tough To Spot AI
One of the problems with AI use seeping out of business and science writing and into the ‘literary’ world is that literary editors may be the worst equipped to identify AI writing. – London Review of Books
- London’s West End To Get First-Ever Production With Audience Phone Ban
The show is the Broadway transfer of Bess Wohl’s play Liberation, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and may win a Tony this Sunday). Audience members were required to put their phones in sealed pouches so nobody would film nude scenes, and producers intend to maintain that requirement in London. – The Guardian
- Bari Weiss May Have Killed Television’s Most Successful Show Ever
“I don’t know Bari Weiss’ motivations, but it’s hard to imagine that you would create so much turmoil in such a profitable show if what you really cared about was the bottom line.” – The Wrap (MSN)
- Criticism In The Age Of AI: It’s Superfluous
The early parts of the story of how the humanities turned against “the human” are well told in two intellectual histories. – Hedgehog Review
- The Japanese Dancers Who Have Chosen To Work In Russia
“I love Russian ballet and always wanted to become a dancer, but there is no national ballet school in Japan, so I chose Russia,” says his compatriot Haruka Takemi, 20, who has lived in Russia for six years. – AFP (MSN)
- Archaeologists Are Discovering Centuries’ Worth Of Paris History Underneath Notre-Dame
“Among the hundreds of objects already found: a fourth-century coin stamped with the face of the Emperor Constantine, and shards of medieval pottery painted on the inside with marks no expert has yet deciphered — like a modern Da Vinci Code.” – AP
- The Man Now Making Movie Decisions For Netflix
Dan Lin’s instructions at Netflix are to spend less money on fewer, better movies. – The New York Times
- The Music Industry’s Music Streaming Problem
The industry is not short of superfans. It never has been. It is short of the infrastructure and the will to treat them as customers. – Music Business Worldwide
