The pit orchestra "will disappear along with the show. It holds 27 full-time musicians, 11 of whom have been with Phantom since it opened in the late 1980s." Those musicians have built comfortable lives, which are about to be upended. - The New York Times
In Pascale Sablan's second week at the Pratt Institute, "a young white professor asked Sablan and another female student to stand up in a classroom. ... 'These two will never become architects because they're Black and because they're women,' she recalled him saying." - NPR
"I worry about how moods are being targeted in music by a company’s algorithms. But I know he loves this music, albeit in a very different way to me. I wonder why I spend so much time worrying." - The Observer (UK)
"To achieve the specific sense of degradation, ... the team would build sets then wear them down, wreck them, or, as Paino refers to the process, 'desiccate them,' as if 20 years had truly passed." - Fast Company
"I read her 'Cathedral' while she rested her head in my lap. It was 'really something' as you had said. Your story, I mean, and this life too. There were times when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to say that and mean it, but I felt it that day, and I feel it now." - The Smart Set
The survey "exposes how many artists, especially those from less privileged backgrounds, have to sustain multiple additional jobs to subsidise poorly paid commissions in the public sector. Some told of deciding to leave the art world entirely to protect their mental health and financial security." - The Guardian (UK)
"Just in case you're only feeling partially exercised at the evening's pending legit controversies and fashion disasters, let me give you one more reason to sharpen your hashtags. I'm here to argue the obvious: The Academy is getting its best song category all wrong." - NPR
The updated list from Washington Post's critics, who started the article in 2016 but, as the writers say, "they just keep on handing out Oscars to the wrong movies." (The 1980s, yikes. But then Crash, oh no.) - Washington Post
"At first, the Minnesota Opera planned to adapt The Song Poet as a youth opera—part of a program then called Project Opera. But in 2020, that changed with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a racial justice uprising that challenged representation in the arts." - Sahan Journal
What do they want? Health care! When do they want it? In the contract for the future. And pay: "By offering annual increases that lag behind industry standards, pushing for a deal that ignores the soaring cost of living.” - Los Angeles Times
"With the pandemic seemingly in the rearview mirror but the city still seeking its new normal, New York’s recovery depends on fortifying, not diminishing, tent-poles like parks, streets and libraries." - The New York Times
