"The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society has reached an agreement with the Broadway League on a new four-year contract that covers associate directors and choreographers for the first time. … (They) had been one of the rare non-unionized groups on Broadway." - The Hollywood Reporter
For the 50 largest companies, the average salary for both positions is over $200,000, and the gender gap in pay averages 17% for artistic directors but only 3% for executive directors. - Dance Data Project
After hiding from authorities for seven months, Nicholas Dombek appeared at a Scranton, Pa. courthouse. He's one of nine alleged members of a ring that stole valuable sports memorabilia, art, and other items from 20 venues including Scranton's Everhart Museum, from which a Warhol and a Pollock were taken. - ARTnews
"Her imaginative collages and assemblages have drawn on, not just borrowed — and sometimes edited — quotations by everyone from Milton to Kerouac and Gershwin, and also her recycling of such unexpected raw material as silverware, pressed flowers, seashells and discarded brooms." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
Under Wayne Brown, the company "has placed itself at the center of operatic conversation, … broken fund-raising records, (and) drawn first-time ticket buyers by the thousands," writes David Allen. What's more, says Deborah Borda, "He has a kind word for all, which is quite unusual in our business." - The New York Times
The analytics firm Gower Street estimates that global sales of movie tickets in 2023 add up to $33.9 billion, an increase of 31% from 2022 but still 15% behind the last three-year average before COVID. - The Hollywood Reporter
In the US, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. In the EU, Canada, and Latin America, works by Dylan Thomas, Django Reinhardt, and Hank Williams. In most of Asia and Africa, everything by Picasso and Tolkien. - The Public Domain Review
For 31 out of 52 weeks, female acts topped the chart either as solo artists or in collaboration with other musicians. Miley Cyrus had the biggest song of the year, with the break-up anthem Flowers attracting 198 million streams. But new music was largely absent from the year's top 10 best-selling albums. - BBC
Winner of the week? Disney’s The Lion King, which grossed a massive $4,316,629, not only setting a house record at the Minskoff but a Broadway record for the highest single-week gross ever, a big achievement even when noting that the long-running musical played nine performances, as did other productions over the holidays. - Deadline
Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, on par with the equivalent figure from the previous year. - ARTnews
If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that — what do you know? — a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial. - The New York Times
"When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop – not his phone, his laptop – while I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to f***ing be’. I was pausing and (the stage team) were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way’.” - The Guardian
The center’s latest report, titled Inclusion in the Director’s Chair, called the entertainment industry’s pledges to promote inclusion “performative acts” and “not real steps towards fostering change”. - The Guardian
Syriac, a 2,000-year-old tongue closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, is today the language of Iraq's Orthodox Christians, a community whose numbers have fallen from 1.5 million to 400,000 over the last twenty war-torn years. A new all-Syriac network is helping keep the language alive. - The World
