To be fair, the Skagit Valley Chorale (the one where 52 of 61 singers eventually got COVID from a single rehearsal in March 2020) is singing together now - over Zoom. But a planned return in the fall looks bumpy, thanks to politics around vaccine requirements. - NPR
It takes extraordinary measures to deal with the thieves. "Looters have been plundering Italy’s cultural sites for decades, but since 2012 their trade has not been as fruitful, owing to an intensified crackdown by Italy’s art police. ... In 2020, the squad found 24 illegal digs, arrested 68 thieves and recuperated 17,503 archaeological artefacts. The unit carries out controls...
Rovère's character "Arlette has struck a chord as everyone’s ideal disreputable aunt with a repertoire of outrageous stories that she just might tell if the burgundy is flowing. She is the sly, sharp-tongued doyenne of top Paris talent agency ASK, who knows where the bodies are buried, and just when to dig them up." But her character is more...
And this didn't happen once, bad as that would have been. The company says "two black dancers had people scream racial epithets at them while driving by, and it happened on two separate occasions last week." - KSL
We don't avoid telling stories about difficult topics. "There have been numerous movies about slavery, about Jim Crow, about the Vietnam War. There have even been movies about America’s inaction to the genocide in Rwanda, a story whose national footprint is likely much smaller than that of the Tulsa massacre’s. Yet when it comes to the more than 30...
Author Valeria Luiselli just won the Dublin literary award. She says that she, her daughter, and her niece have been reading out loud to each other since the pandemic began. "I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’s human experiences – we would not have made it...
Yes, that's a weird confluence, but Cruella still makes it happen. "Cruella signposts something essential about punk: the power of reinvention. For the original punks, clothes weren’t just clothes but a ticket to a whole new you, cut to your own design." - The Guardian (UK)
The history of the New York Times Book Review is pretty interesting for word nerds. "Although photos already appeared in other parts of the paper, these came only later to the Book Review. The publication turned instead to typography — some of it quite fanciful — to set its distinctive-looking pages apart." - The New York Times
With barriers at every turn, from an anxious director who didn't want to work with the leading actors to disastrous early scripts, no one expected Midnight Cowboy to get completed - or be a hit. Jerome Hellman "helped steer the project through crisis after crisis, fudging on cost estimates, fighting with recalcitrant collaborators and surreptitiously shooting scenes on the...
Both on Master of None and Solos, even when the pandemic isn't in the script, it affects everything. New seasons feel "intriguingly defined by current events, and yet similarly handicapped by them." It's not easy to make TV during a global pandemic, but, says a critic, "All I want now, watching shows after 14 months of social withdrawal, is...
MacLeod had been a working, but struggling, actor for many years when he read for The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. He had been asked to audition for the role of Lou Grant - the role that eventually went to Ed Asner - but asked to read for Murray instead. "As Murray, the balding, humble head writer and...
Celebration Theatre's longtime AD Michael Shepperd was accused of sexual misconduct over more than a decade - and the accusers say that the theatre mishandled those complaints until last week, when an internal investigation prompted the theatre to let him go. When there's a power differential, can a small theatre be a "safe, sex-positive" space? - Los Angeles Times
The problem is a new variant: "After delays caused by Covid, the festival confirmed it would take place in early July, but France has announced a seven-day isolation period for visitors from the UK in response to rising concerns over the Covid variant B.1.617.2, first detected in India. The move is likely to affect thousands, both among the press corps and...
Her rifle was important during the war; her camera became more important after: "As one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers, Mrs. Schulman, thanks to her own graphic record-keeping, debunked the common narrative that most Eastern European Jews had gone quietly to their deaths." - The New York Times
Yes, that's right, the long-running sitcom (still massively popular with Millennials and Gen-Zers thanks to streaming) is useful for English language-learners around the world. "The dad jeans and cordless telephones may look dated, but the plot twists — falling in love, starting a career and other seminal moments in a young person’s life — are still highly relatable." -...
