In a regular year, it's North America's largest summer theatre festival, but with the pandemic only barely starting to subside, Stratford is planning to present just a dozen or so performances, each featuring no more than eight cast members and running about 90 minutes, on two stages under large canopies outside their theatres in central Ontario. - Global News...
"The Last Supper was gifted to St Michael and All Angels Church in Ledbury, Herefordshire, in 1909. Art historian Ronald Moore believes he has now discovered Titian's signature on the canvas during restoration work." - BBC
"The chariot is preserved in remarkable detail, officials say, with four iron wheels, metal armrests and backrests, and a seat perched atop that could sit one or two people. Notably, the chariot is adorned with metal medallions depicting satyrs, nymphs and cupids, suggesting the possibility that it may have been used in marriage ceremonies." - NPR
The government is topping up the £1.57 billion ($1.9 billion) Culture Recovery Fund announced last July with an extra £300 million ($416 million), with an additional £90 million ($125 million) for English national museums and heritage sites and £18.8 million ($26 million) for local community-based projects. Alongside that funding designated for England, arts groups in Scotland, Wales, and Northern...
For now, pronoun declarations are both novel and blatant — which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you’re socially progressive or socially conservative. As in almost every other segment of American life, society is fractured. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. - The Atlantic
“I think the future of that looks like we embrace the cinematic, and digital media side of opera to an even greater degree. And when we come back to live performances, those have to be a compelling reason to attend something live.” - LBPost
In less than three years, Merck Mercuriadis has become the most disruptive force in the music business. Put simply, Hipgnosis, his company, raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. - The Guardian
"The world is watching. 30% of the members of the MET Orchestra can no longer sustain a living in New York City due to being faced with no salary from the Metropolitan Opera since April 1, 2020. This number will likely climb higher as the crisis continues." - Gramilano
The background to the 10-year (at least) truce: "In 1915 the Irish art collector Sir Hugh Lane was among nearly 1,200 people who died when the Lusitania, an ocean liner, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the southern coast of Ireland. His will revealed that he had bequeathed his breathtaking collection of impressionist paintings to the National Gallery in London. But...
The game-changers were the pandemic, and also awards-nominated movies One Night in Miami and Sound of Metal, not to mention Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Those films, "coupled with the cultural impact Borat has enjoyed across the globe, have significantly altered the perception of Amazon Studios’ film division in Hollywood and among Amazon’s more than 150 million Prime subscribers. (The studio,...
A spokesman for the UN Secretary General said, "I feel sad and a sense of loss looking at that empty wall. ... The tapestry was not only a moving reminder of the horrors of war but, because of where it stood, it was also a witness to so much history that unfolded outside of the Security Council since 1985."...
A study, published in 2019, looked at long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. - The New Yorker
For one thing, it's OK to fight. Writers are also seeing back pay come in - and letting the union win it for them instead of fighting alone. And then there's at least one intangible: "I have seen ... an improvement in terms of how a writer looks at themselves and their value next to their representatives, that the...
