The glass-domed plaza between the Philadelphia arts center's venues was intended to be a welcoming public space. Yet it tends to be desolate during the day, despite years of efforts to liven it up. The design of the new café there doesn't help, but the space still has potential. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
“Broadway has seen more foot traffic and bigger audiences in the first month since the curtain went up on the congestion pricing era — though it’s too early for some to say whether the Manhattan tolls played a starring or a cameo role in such success.“ - amNY
Next season the company will experiment with scheduling consecutive performances of the same opera with different casts, this to save money by not moving sets in and out of the theater. There will be more performances of the most popular repertory staples and fewer performances of contemporary works on weekends. - AP
Who knew the fourth entry in what seemed a played-out story would prove both so well reviewed and so well attended? The film “accounted for 45% of the UK box office take over the weekend.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The adversaries-turned-allies famously shaped the course of American history, even though the two leaders met in person only three times .” - Los Angeles Times
"'The bloom is off the rose of rom-coms,' says Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst. 'There was a period in which they couldn’t miss. But then there were a number that were absolutely awful, and streaming changed things. Now you need spectacle to get audiences into theaters.'" - Variety
“All of our feeds are at their core tremendously banal: They’re just windows into what people do with themselves all day, repeated over and over again. And we watch, because, for some reason, we love watching humans be humans.” - The New York Times
"(Researchers) gathered a group of 15 to 20 people monthly for six months to talk about how they viewed news in general and the BBC in particular. They were starting from a low point: 'about 90% of the participants said they don’t trust the BBC to tell the truth.'" - Nieman Lab
In its second to last year in Park City, Utah, “it was hard to escape the specter of those difficult times,” including - of course - the fires in Los Angeles. - Washington Post
He’s simply quite Christian now. “The supposed edginess of the Christian Actor stems from the idea that in godless Hollywood it’s somehow taboo to be religious, and that an openly Christian actor will face some kind of retaliation.” - Slate
The Batman (176 minutes). Oppenheimer (180 minutes). Avengers: Endgame (182 minutes!). The Irishman (a whopping 209 minutes!). Do Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan want us to develop urinary tract infections? It's time, argues Travis Andrews, to follow the example of The Brutalist. - The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
The deal, which supposedly ameliorates some of the damage from last year’s audiobook-music bundling plan by the streaming giant, “also marks the first direct license between Spotify and a major publisher in several years.” - Variety
A regular rotation of theatre articles and criticism from daily papers (whatever those are) isn’t coming back. So it’s up to theatre makers to keep writing, posting, blogging, making video about the process and the products - and critics need to deal with it. - The Stage (UK)
It’s edifyiing, truly: "Gazing over hundreds of heads and shifting my weight around in the dark, I was reminded time and again that theaters are just rooms full of people whose vulnerability, uncertainty and imperfections — including my own — are what bring them alive.” - Washington Post (Yahoo)
"Surveying 2,000 people, the 2022 report shows that 65 percent of people aged 18–34 listen to orchestral music regularly, compared to 57 percent of people aged 55+ and 56 percent for those aged 35–54." However, "older people are more likely to listen to orchestral music in a concert hall." - Limelight (Australia)
