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The Show’s Going On Down Under

This sounds wildly exotic and dangerous to most theatregoers in the U.S. right now: "A few days ago, Kylie Estreich went to a theater in Sydney to see a Broadway show. In person. With hundreds of other people. She showed her ticket, went to her seat, and sat elbow-to-elbow with her masked mother on one side and a masked...

Nielsen Will Begin To Track Diversity Alongside Ratings Numbers

The initiative combines entertainment metadata with Nielsen’s audience measurement data. It’s designed to equip content creators, owners, distributors and advertisers with data around onscreen diversity and representation to enable more inclusive content. - Los Angeles Times

Research Paper Linking Violence To Video Games Is Retracted

"Zhang and his co-authors reported high levels of statistical significance for their finding, but the reported differences in the effects of violent games versus nonviolent games were too small for that high statistical significance to be possible." - Science

Keeping Up Live Performance As The World Goes Virtual

"We have a total commitment to live performance. That's what we do. We're not a film company," says the director of the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia. What's more, "we really wanted to maintain work for artists as much as possible, as well as our staff, … at a time when they really didn't have a lot of options." And...

How Can ‘Our Town’ Still Feel Utterly Contemporary, 80 Years After Its Opening?

Howard Sherman, author of a new book about the play: "It's a play that people think they know. People want to paint it as this old-fashioned love letter to the past. And that's not what it is at all." - NPR

Malls And Nail Salons Are Open, But Not Museums?

Dear Gavin Newsom, this makes no sense at all. Signed, a lot of LACMA and other art-lovers in California. Weirdly: "LACMA can open its Resnick Pavilion gift shop but not the galleries within the same Resnick Pavilion — even though the two share a front door and a ventilation system. The same goes at the Huntington Library, Art Museum...

Empty Movie Theaters Are Being Rented Out To Video Gamers

The cinema chain Malco has been doing this in six Southern states since November, and the South Korean chain CGV started it in January. With prices for a small group of players running around $100 for two hours, it's not close to making up for the lack of moviegoers, but it's at least a bit of income. And the...

Orchestras Must Overthrow The Tyranny Of Subscription Programming, Says NY Times

Anthony Tommasini: " locks them into standard-issue, week-after-week programs loaded with the classics and sprinkled, at best, with unusual or new choices. … Why can't orchestras be nimble and respond to sudden inspiration, or current events? If the Pittsburgh Symphony has a hit with a premiere, why must audiences in other cities wait years to hear it?" - The...

Facing Another COVID Summer, British Theatres Are Building Outdoor Stages

Social distancing is easier outdoors and there's more air circulation, not to mention the fact that, as one director puts it, "Outdoor arts is more accessible because it's in democratic open spaces." So companies across the UK are getting ready to perform outside their buildings, many for the first time, as soon as weather and health regulations permit. -...

In Britain, Thousands Protest The Idea Of Closing To The Public A Library That Was Left To The Nation

The Wallace Collection "is in internal consultation" about closing the library and archive that was left to the country in 1897. Is that even legal? Will anyone notice during the pandemic? (More than 10,000 people certainly have noticed.) - The Guardian (UK)

Ballet Dancers, Getting Real (And Sometimes Really Funny) On TikTok

If Instagram is about selling your moves - and your clothing line, your toe shoe line, your skin care routine, etc. - then TikTok is about being yourself. Kind of. "Casual, confessional and playful, TikTok offers a release for ballet dancers, particularly students, who spend their days chasing impossible perfection. TikTok is a place to laugh about the impossibility,...

Binging Or Drip Drip Drip? The Pros And Cons Of Streaming

Are we really just pleasure-seeking audiences looking for that instant hit of media indulgence? As the effects of lockdown and zoom fatigue have exposed, society seems to be increasingly experiencing media fatigue. - The Conversation

Should Prime-Time TV Series Work In COVID Storylines? Or Is That The Last Thing The Audience Wants?

"In rooms all over the internet, hospital dramas, first-responder shows, situation comedies and courtroom procedurals were having similar debates. To ignore the events of the spring and summer — the pandemic, America's belated racial reckoning — meant placing prime-time series outside (well, even more outside) observable reality. But to include them meant potentially exhausting already exhausted viewers and...

Could We Really Revive The Federal Theatre Project? How Would That Work In 2021?

The short answer is that it couldn't work the way it did in the 1930s: the legal and theatrical landscape then was too different. (For a start, there was no such thing as not-for-profit theatre.) But there are certainly possibilities; here are a few of them. - American Theatre

The Times’s ‘Five Minutes That Will Make You Love {Piano/Sopranos/String Quartets}’ Series? It’s Working

Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), "It has doubled our audience for classical music. It's gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it." - The New York Times

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