Good Morning,
Hadestown took $10.2 million in North American cinemas its opening weekend, the biggest ever for a filmed stage show, ahead of Hamilton (also double what Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook movie update took in). Director Brett Sullivan shot it live at London’s Lyric Theatre with the Broadway principals, then added no-audience studio sessions for the close-ups (ArtsHub).
In Havana, Impulso Teatro, a company working in a converted Vedado mansion, now plays with no electricity or sound system, and candles outside the door, because neighborhood blackouts approach 24 hours a day. Director Linda Soriano told her 14 actors they could stay home, but 88-year-old Carlos Perez keeps coming (Reuters).
Steve Reich, now 90, tells the Times he has just written one of his best pieces in years (The New York Times).
When Mysterious Tech Studio streamed Mystery of Osu Land, billed as the first photorealistic AI-generated feature in Yoruba, the crowd crashed the host platform’s servers (Variety) – Africa’s into AI, apparently.
Getty Images will file Chapter 11 and go private with Koch money; it says iStock faces “declining agency demand and disruption,” while its editorial photography is projected to grow from $369 million to $400 million by 2029 (The Hollywood Reporter). This from the dominant image licensor on the planet.
South Carolina’s Arts Commission voted 5-3 on October 1 to deny grants to the Greenville Gay Men’s Chorus and Spartanburg’s Proud Mary Theatre Company. Its chair, Flavia Harton, has since resigned, and so has Rip Parks, who had written in June that he “could not defend these programs to concerned legislators” (The Post and Courier).
All of the stories we collected below.