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Home > Miscellaneous
Thursday, 18 February 2010
At his Theatre Ideas blog, the ever-provocative Scott
Walters has been defending his NEA-funded CRADLE project in this post. The comments section has become a debate on
the funding of individual artists vs. collectives, and Scott makes the
statement that, when it comes to government arts subsidy, "the criteria
for giving money would be whether it makes a positive contribution to the
public good." Interesting reading.
Home > Miscellaneous
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
I've just updated the list of my recent and upcoming publications on my Web site. A busy year; some will be
online, I believe, but most not. Keep an eye out.
And a brief note to mention the passing of film director Eric Rohmer,
89, on Monday. A fine critic who was instrumental in bringing the unique
visual styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks to the attention of a
more specialized audience, Rohmer's films included Pauline at the
Beach and, my personal favorite, Chloe in the Afternoon. In
the New York Times obituary, Dave Kehr writes:
In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional
tone of much of the work of Truffaut and to the politically provocative
films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist
aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose
words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer's work was
warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps
all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his
elegant, orderly films.
On the occasion of Rohmer's death, French president Nicolas Sarkozy
said, "Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious,
sentimental and moralistic, he created the 'Rohmer style,' which will
outlive him." Kehr's full obituary can be found here.
Home > Miscellaneous
Monday, 11 January 2010
Terry Teachout at the Wall Street Journal has been sifting through the
most-frequently-produced-plays lists provided by
American Theatre magazine for the past decade and comes up with a
few surprising figures (David Byrne, take note). Terry's conclusion:
For me, though, the really big surprise was the dog that
didn't bark. Only one of the top 11 plays, The Glass Menagerie,
is a classic, and it was written in 1944. The others were all written
between 1994 and 2006. And in addition to The Glass Menagerie,
only five classics by playwrights other than Shakespeare ... made it onto
the longer list.
As for the celebrated playwrights of the past who didn't
make the cut, the list is alarmingly long. No Samuel Beckett, no Bertolt
Brecht, no Anton Chekhov, no Georges Feydeau, no Henrik Ibsen, no William
Inge, no Eugene Ionesco, no Arthur Miller, no Clifford Odets, no Eugene
O'Neill, no George Bernard Shaw, no Aristophanes or Euripides or
Sophocles, no Rodgers and Hammerstein or Frank Loesser or Lerner and Loewe
... no history, in other words.
What to make of all this? It suggests to me that American
theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by
American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles. (Six of
the top 11 plays of the past decade have been produced on Broadway, while
five of them won Pulitzer Prizes.) Up to a point, that's good news. New
playwrights deserve a chance, and it looks like most of our drama
companies are giving it to at least some of them. But it also appears that
far too many of those same companies may be steering clear of the
classical revivals that are no less central to the continuing health of a
theatrical culture — and that is very bad news indeed.
Terry's full article, with more news about dead white males and others,
is here.
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