“Pomerance wrote The Elephant Man for his theater company, Foco Novo, and it became one of the most successful plays to ever come out of London. Set in the Victorian era, it opened in April 1979 on Broadway at the Booth Theatre and went on to play 916 performances and capture the Tony Award for best play.”
Archives for August 2017
In DC, Newseum Loses Its CEO And Considers Selling Its Building
“Jeffrey Herbst, president and chief executive of the Newseum, stepped down suddenly on Monday as the museum’ board announced a full-blown review of its long-troubled finances. The review could result in the sale of [its] landmark building on Pennsylvania Avenue,” to which it moved in 2008.
The Ideological Battle Dividing The World Is Perfectly Illustrated By The Fight Over Poland’s New World War II Museum
The museum in Gdańsk had become a political football well before it opened earlier this year. “On one side, you have the universalists, armed with their globalism, liberalism, and concerns for human rights. On the other, you have the nationalists, wielding their exceptionalism, isolationism, and often conservative religious values. These two narratives clash as they try to define polarized nations and their place in the world.”
Utah Museum Of Fine Arts Reopens After 19-Month Renovation And ‘Reimagining’
The physical plant and climate control have been fixed up, the galleries have been reconfigured, and even the labels and wall text have been rethought.
Repertory Theatre Of St. Louis’s Artistic Director To Step Down After Three Decades
“The sixth artistic director at the Rep, [Steven] Woolf, has held the position longer than anyone else. In that time, he came to represent the face of the theater – or at least, its colorful sweater. Thanks to radio commercials for new productions, he came to represent its voice as well.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.29.17
New York Festival of Song on a day of wine and roses
The New York Festival of Song is one of those distinctively urban pleasures: Its season is a series of hand-crafted programs often mixing European art song with great American popular music, pairing the right singer with the right music in exactly the right sequence. But I had to re-acquaint myself with NYFOS in the village of Orient on the far North Fork of Long Island after missing it for many years. … read more
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-08-29
What’s In A Name: Cuneiform
Curious about the name of a small, imaginative jazz record company named Cuneiform, I asked Joyce Feigenbaum, the company’s publicist, who is married to the owner, how the label’s name came about. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-08-29
Edinburgh Fringe Festival Posts Fifth Consecutive Attendance Records
“This is an increase of 8.96% on last year’s figures, while the number of productions staged during the event rose by a more modest 3.95% to 3,398. The figures do not include footfall at the 686 free events in the official fringe programme or figures for the two free-fringe programmes not aligned with the official fringe.”
How Does The Brain Make Memories?
Memory may appear to be a reproduction of images, sounds, and even thoughts that can be stored in the brain in a manner analogous to the way information can be stored on a CD, but it is becoming increasingly evident that this is too limited an understanding.
How Regular Meditation Promotes Creativity
Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronic are among the many leading firms that have introduced meditation and other mindfulness practices to their employees. Executives at these and other companies say meditation is not only useful as a stress-reduction tool but can also enhance creativity, opening doors where once there seemed to be only a wall.
Where’s The Best Place To sit In A Concert Hall?
“To answer this burning question, we turned to Raj Patel of the design and engineering consulting firm Arup Group and Kate Wagner of the viral architecture blog McMansion Hell. She’s also studying acoustics at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, synthesizing her interests in music and architecture. What did we learn?”
Why Political Documentaries Are Filling Our Screens
If audiences are getting tired of the formulaic story arcs of blockbuster movies, then there’s a safe haven in political documentaries, which are enjoying a renaissance.
Study: World’s Most-Popular Museums Ranked
A study by the Erasmus University School of Management in Rotterdam surveyed tourists and residents to determine which museums were most popular. Interestingly, the biggest museums were not ranked at the top.
Why The Booker Prize Is Bad For Literature
“There are at least two reasons why almost every anglophone novelist feels compelled to get as near the Booker Prize as they can. The first is because it looms over them and follows them around in the way Guy de Maupassant said the Eiffel Tower follows you everywhere when you’re in Paris.” Even so, writes Amit Chaudhuri, “I’m not saying that the Booker shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that it requires an alternative, and the alternative isn’t another prize.”
The Internet Promised To Democratize News. Instead We Have Fake News. But We’ve Seen This Before
“The openness that was said to bring about a democratic revolution instead seems to have torn a hole in the social fabric. Today, online misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda are seen as the front line of a reactionary populist upsurge threatening liberal democracy. Once held back by democratic institutions, the bad stuff is now sluicing through a digital breach with the help of irresponsible tech companies. Stanching the torrent of fake news has become a trial by which the digital giants can prove their commitment to democracy. The effort has reignited a debate over the role of mass communication that goes back to the early days of radio.”
‘She No Longer Exists As Herself, Only As What We Made Of Her’: Hilary Mantel Considers The Myth Of Princess Diana
“[Royals] are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. … She could not have imagined how insatiable the public would be, once demand for her had been ramped up by the media and her own tactics.”
How The Art Of TV Spread Everywhere
“For nearly a century, television, like the weather, has shaped our behaviors, our moods, and our desires in ways we don’t always comprehend.”
How Millennials Use Public Radio: Study
The respondents value public radio, but, except for Morning Edition, they listen to very little of it in real time. (They prefer on-demand.) And they do have some frustrations.
Netflix’s Content Binge And What It Means For The Video Revolution
“Within five years, television has changed from the prescribed, September-to-May schedule that has existed since the birth of the medium to a never-ending blitz of new shows that networks struggle to keep up with. And even though Netflix hasn’t toppled the similarly staid film calendar as quickly, it could mark the beginning of the end for movie theaters, if the company’s success so far with TV is anything to go by.”
Deaf Music Fans (Yes, They Exist) Are Finally Getting Concerts Made Accessible To Them
If Evelyn Glennie can play music, other deaf people should be able to enjoy it, right? Like Glennie, most deaf music fans perceive the music kinesthetically – they feel the vibrations. And concerts, especially rock concerts, are now providing deaf audience members what they need to take part.
Daniil Simkin Creates A High-Tech Dance For The Guggenheim’s Rotunda
“Imagine a nearly ceaseless stream of digital imagery, beginning with unusual shadows. Computer-generated projections envelop the performers with auras as elastic as bubbles, shimmering and rippling at the edges like the hot air of a mirage. Sometimes the shadows linger after bodies exit, like the quick-fading imprint of fingers pressed on pale skin, or maybe like the soul after death.”
The Personal Essay – Inelegant Language As A Badge Of… Well, Something
“For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy.”
Odd Music Jobs, No. 347: Calling The Cues For The Subtitles At The Opera
“[Lily Arbisser] hopes to someday sing center stage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but for now, she works there behind the scenes as a cue-caller: the person responsible for making sure an opera’s subtitles appear at exactly the moment when the performers onstage sing their lines. Each night’s performance is slightly different, and if the timing isn’t just right, it can ruin the punch line to a joke or give away major spoilers.” (audio)
The Uses Of Professional Theatre Critics (Now That They’re Disappearing)
Mark Shenton considers both an Edinburgh Fringe show “in which three comedians use a device of talking out of their arses (literally) to quote from some of the negative reviews they’ve received” and the directors of L.A. theatres who publicly protested when critics in the city were laid off.
Two Book Critics Consider The Lines Between Praise, Fairness, And Meanness
Thomas Mallon: “Today’s literary reviews too often turn into participation trophies, quiet tour-guide appreciations. Few things, of course, are duller than self-indulgent put-downs; but informed and spirited dismissals are another matter, and they remain in too-short supply.”
Liesl Schillinger: “There’s a distinct line between eulogy and fairness, but every critic knows you make more of a splash when you wield a bludgeon than when you bestow a bouquet. Yet Trollope also recognized that brickbats too readily brandished lose their power to stun.”
Are Civil War Re-Enactments In Their Last Days?
“In every part of the country almost every weekend of the year, participants [learn first-hand] … how a soldier felt charging across grass into battle, down to what he ate at the campfire before forcing sleep to come while lying on a hard earthen floor.” Americans have been staging mock Civil War battles since (believe it or not) 1861. But in these politically and socially contentious times, the practice has become – well, somewhat fraught.