Monday, April 08, 2013

Worth a Look

Here are a few articles from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time:

Spain abandons the theatre

Telegraph: A report published last week showed audiences have fallen by a third at theatres across Spain since the government raised the sales tax on cultural events. The price of theatre tickets rocketed in September when VAT rose from eight to 21 per cent in an emergency measure to boost government coffers and reduce the burgeoning public deficit.
 

Save Tungsten Campaign Launched Internationally

News content from Live Design Magazine: A major campaign to save the tungsten bulb for theatrical use has been launched internationally, with a long list of distinguished lighting designers supporting the cause: Richard Pilbrow, Patrick Woodroffe, Durham Marenghi, Paule Constable, Rick Fisher, Neil Austin, Andrew Bridge, Mark Henderson, Johanna Town, Mark Jonathan, David Hersey, Jennifer Tipton, David Finn, Ken Posner, Don Holder, Ken Billington, Brian MacDevitt, Howell Binkley, Steve Shelley, ML Geiger, Aaron Copp, Seth Jackson, Kevin Adams, Jules Fisher, Christina Giannelli, Mark Stanley and many others, including those in Canada, France, and Australia.
 

Q&A: Neil A. Mazzella

News content from Live Design Magazine: I started in Off Off Broadway in 1973 and did everything, as they really didn’t pay you. After six months I started as an electrician with the Chelsea Theatre Company at BAM. In 1975 I went to graduate school for my MFA at the Yale School of Drama and majored in TD&P—technical design and production. I then worked at the Metropolitan Opera House as a carpenter until 1980, when I founded Hudson Scenic with Gene O’Donovan, who I had met on a show called Ballroom, at the pre-Broadway tryout in Connecticut. Gene left in 1994.
 

'The Flick' Prompts an Explanation From Playwrights Horizons

NYTimes.com: The artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, a leading Off Broadway company that produces new American plays, took the unusual step on Saturday of e-mailing 3,000 of the theater’s subscribers to explain his decision to produce Annie Baker’s new play “The Flick,” whose three-hour length and periods of long silence have infuriated some audience members. The letter, posted below, is the first of its kind for the artistic director, Tim Sanford. In a telephone interview on Monday, he said it was “not an apology,” but rather an effort at “community engagement” over a play that has been embraced by critics – and recently won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize – but has prompted threats of subscription cancellations by some people walking out at intermission. Mr. Sanford said that about 10 percent of the audience had bolted the play at the interval during the first week of performances in February, but that those numbers have diminished since.
 

Can unions save the creative class?

Salon.com: They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest – and they hate our freedom. That’s the kind of noise you pick up in 21st century America – in politics and popular culture alike – when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. Union membership, and ensuing muscle, have been in steep decline in both the public and private sectors. Just look at Wisconsin’s “right to work” push, the anti-teachers union “reform” movement, corporate union-busting, P.R. “messaging” firms hired by management to smear striking workers, hostility from the Republican right and indifference from a Democratic Party that’s reoriented itself around professionals and Silicon Valley.

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