"Audience numbers still aren't back to where they were in 2019. Emergency state and federal funding has nearly evaporated, and (expected) annual arts funding … wasn’t approved by the Oregon Legislature. All this has forced arts groups to put capital improvement projects on hold or scale back their seasons." - The Oregonian
The discourse about critics in the theatre has been so mindlessly hostile for so long that most of the time, the sensible thing for people in the press to do is ignore it. The lack of respect for criticism is deeply embedded in too many theatres that were built in part on press attention. - American Theatre
A German Jew named Curt Bloch spent two years, with two other people, living in a little crawl space in the Dutch city of Enschede. Along with food, his protectors brought him the materials to produce 95 issues of an original publication he called The Underwater Cabaret. - The New York Times
Shows about struggling, intrepid women are doing well. So are zombies, devils, and serial killers. Spanish-language series are major hits, and, as writer Lili Loofbourow put it, "We knew K-dramas were a phenomenon, but this is ridiculous." What aren't doing as well as expected? Comedy specials. - The Washington Post (MSN)
"The 60-year-old (artist) was recently in Australia ... and was on her way back to the UK via Thailand when she fell ill. 'Not cancer but horrible complications with my intestines brought on by an infection, scar tissue and made a million times worse by flying,' she wrote." - The Guardian
The city's Coney Island amusement park, opened in 1886, had fallen out of public favor in the past few years. The Cincinnati Symphony's subsidiary, Music & Event Management Inc. (MEMI), has purchased the site to build a $118 million outdoor amphitheater for touring popular acts as well as orchestra concerts. - WCPO (Cincinnati)
"It’s hard to mint a new movie star these days, (so) people in Hollywood were high on Jonathan Majors, … (and) this was supposed to be the year that would turn him into an A-lister." Instead, his career collapsed within minutes of his conviction for assaulting his now-ex-girlfriend. - The New York Times
The German-born Schmidt, widely admired for his stewardship of the Uffizi in Florence, acquired Italian citizenship last month; he'll be replacing French national Sylvain Bellenger at the Capodimonte in Naples. The other nine new directors are Italian-born museum professionals. - Artnet
"David Landay, the only one of the 1982 show’s four writers who is alive, added a prologue and revised the plot so that the women foil the kidnapping attempt" - but the heirs of the other 1982 writers aren't on board. - The New York Times
Long before generative AI became widely available, people were making “cheapfakes” or “shallowfakes.” It can be as simple as mislabeling images, videos, or audio clips to imply they’re from a different time or location, or editing a piece of media to make it look like something happened that didn’t. - Wired
“Maestro” is a complete enough achievement that there is no point in dwelling on what it might have done differently. What’s most significant is the fundamental respect that the film shows for music and musicians—which is not the same as awe for Bernstein himself. - The New Yorker
On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. - Public Books
In 2022 alone, 1,266 non-physics authors published the equivalent of one paper every 5 days, including weekends, compared with 387 in 2016. The accelerated growth since 2016 was surprising because an earlier analysis showed that extreme productivity was beginning to plateau in 2014. - Nature
Disney in 2019 was hit with a suit accusing it of “rampant pay discrimination.” The case cleared a major hurdle Dec. 8 when a judge certified a diverse class of employees, who work across the company’s movie production arm, record labels, theme parks and home distribution subsidiaries, among various other units. - The Hollywood Reporter
The clip drew heavy criticism on Fox News and in The New York Post. It was shocking to see something as innocuous as “The Nutcracker” stir up such outrage. - The New York Times
