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ArtsBeat: Jessica Walter on the Return of ‘Arrested Development’
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 4:31pm
Ms. Walter discusses how she kept up with the new season’s convoluted structure and why a nice person like her keeps getting cast as mean mothers.
Categories: Art Wire
Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories
Slate Art - May 21, 2013 - 4:28pm
Few albums this year have been more eagerly awaited than Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, the French duo’s first studio album in eight years. A 15-second clip of the first single, “Get Lucky,” led to an avalanche of YouTube homages, loops, and remixes from fans desperate to make a meal from any bone Daft Punk tossed in their direction. “Get Lucky” was released in full last month, and the breezy, infectious disco hit seemed to be a good omen. But after the mountains of advance hype piled on Random Access Memories, the album itself—a wildly ambitious, slow-burning ’70s-style colossus that you can’t really dance to—came as a surprise. To some, it was a huge disappointment.
Categories: Art Wire
Is Anywhere Safe in a Tornado?
Slate Art - May 21, 2013 - 4:17pm
At least 24 people are dead after a powerful tornado tore through Moore, Okla., Monday. “Numerous neighborhoods were completely leveled,” Sgt. Gary Knight of the Oklahoma City Police Department told the New York Times. According to Moore resident Ricky Stover, the twister even tore open his locked cellar door. Is anywhere safe in such a powerful tornado?
Categories: Art Wire
ArtsBeat: Cannes Film Festival: James Franco on Adapting Novels and Multitasking
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 4:09pm
James Franco, whose Faulkner adaptation for the big-screen, “As I Lay Dying,” is playing at Cannes, discusses his love of Faulkner and his ability to handle multiple projects at once.
Categories: Art Wire
ArtsBeat: Audio: Making Music With Cicadas
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 3:27pm
David Rothenberg talks about his long history of studying and performing with animals and his “Bug Music” project.
Categories: Art Wire
All Killer Tornadoes Since 1950
Slate Art - May 21, 2013 - 3:04pm
Currently, 24 people are confirmed dead after a tornado swept through Moore, Okla., on Monday, leaving devastation in its wake. If the death toll goes unchanged, the tornado will rank as the 37th most deadly since 1950, according to historical data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, mapped above. The map includes a 1953 tornado that killed 94; a 1953 tornado that killed 116; the more recent 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado, which killed 158; and the 1999 tornado that also struck Moore, Okla., killing 36.
Categories: Art Wire
ArtsBeat: Christian Borle and Shuler Hensley in New Encores! Lineup
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 2:45pm
The new Encores! season features the musicals “Little Me,” “The Most Happy Fella” and “Irma La Douce.”
Categories: Art Wire
'Arrested Development' Leads The Charge For Old Brands In New Media
NPR Arts and Culture - May 21, 2013 - 2:37pm
Brands that found their original audiences in traditional, old-media platforms are finding ways to keep going in the world of new media.
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Museums put oddball objects on show
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:53pm
First Time Out project will display unusual treasures that curators have retrieved from their stores
Oddball objects that are normally hidden away in museum curators' stores – including a working guillotine carved by Napoleonic prisoners of war from a cow bone left over from dinner – are going on display for the first time at museums across England.
Each of 10 museums taking part in the First Time Out project is to display one of the most unusual or downright weird treasures that curators have retrieved from their stores. For the project, each object will then move on to a new location in another museum and be placed among different exhibits.
Peterborough Museum's guillotine was carved in macabre detail, even down to a basket waiting for a chopped off head, by French POWs held at Norman Cross near the city, from 1803 to 1815. Many of the prisoners became skilled carvers and craft workers, using scraps of rubbish including straw, wood, and left-over bones from meals, and handmade tools, including glass fragments, to make toys and ornaments to sell to visitors.
Peterborough Museum has about 700 such pieces, the largest public collection in the world.
Kew Gardens is putting out one of the rarest publications in its collection, by one of the most famous authors. Charles Darwin's first book was a slim, privately printed volume of extracts from his letters sent home from HMS Beagle, written 24 years before the book that would change the world of science, On The Origin Of Species. The book, one of fewer than 100 copies printed, has never been displayed outside Kew's library. It will be shown for the first time beside the original letters, before it moves to the Lightbox gallery and museum in Woking.
The Natural History Museum is to display a skull that it inherited in 1936 from the vast collections of Baron Rothschild. It has only recently been identified as the skull of a rough-toothed dolphin, finished with paint and scrimshaw – patterns incised on bones by sailors enduring long whaling trips.
An expert on such decoration, from the National Maritime Museum, has tentatively dated it – by the images of ships – to around 1850, but its creator will never be known, nor how it ended up in the Rothschild collections.
The Wellcome collection has dug out a cigar holder carved in 1864 from meerschaum clay, which was commonly used for making pipes. It shows in detail the coronation procession of Ludwig II. He became famed for his increasingly extravagant building projects, until he and his doctor were found dead in the lake at one of his castles, fulfilling his remark: "I wish to remain an eternal enigma."
Newcastle's Discovery Museum is exhibiting one of the earliest lightbulbs. It was made by Joseph Swan in 1881 and at the time cost a staggering 35 shillings, roughly equivalent to £130 today.
Swan had, on 20 October 1880, demonstrated his discovery to an astonished audience in Newcastle. One young man at the demonstration, John Holmes, was so awed he applied unsuccessfully to become Swan's assistant, but then he set up his own domestic lighting business in the city.
He went on to invent the quick-break light switch, the ancestor of almost all those in use today. It will be shown alongside the bulb.
Maev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Categories: Art Wire
ArtsBeat: Jeffrey Tambor on the Return of ‘Arrested Development’
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 1:48pm
Mr. Tambor discusses his evolution into an “Internet guy” and why he doesn’t mind fans yelling at him.
Categories: Art Wire
The Great Beauty: watch the trailer for Paolo Sorrentino's new film
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:46pm
Watch the trailer for Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino's new drama, about a journalist haunted by the early, unrealised promise of his first and only novel
Categories: Art Wire
First Time Out exhibition – in pictures
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:40pm
Ten previously hidden objects, weird, wonderful and beautiful by turn, go on display in First Time Out
Categories: Art Wire
Eddie Braben: friends and fellow comic writers pay tribute
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:34pm
David Baddiel among those praising screenwriter who 'played all the right notes, in the right order, all the time'
Friends and fellow comic writers paid tribute on Tuesday to Eddie Braben after his death at the age of 82.
His manager, Norma Farnes, who announced his death, said: "It was Billy Cotton Jr at the BBC who recognised the brilliance of Eddie's writing was the ideal marriage that would guarantee the success of Morecambe and Wise.
"Eddie was a very humble man, a very quiet man and a very private man. He had a lot of integrity, which is in short supply in this business.
"I have to say – and he would have disagreed with this – that writing came easy to him, even on bad days, when he was writing Christmas shows for Eric and Ernie and he was under great pressure."
Miranda Hart, who interviewed Braben for a BBC1 documentary on Eric Morecambe earlier this year, tweeted: "Feel so privileged to have met Eddie Braben. One of our greatest comedy writers who brought joy to millions. Thank you Eddie."
Other tributes on Twitter included Richard Osman: "Eddie Braben was my absolute TV hero. The greatest 'behind the cameras' talent of them all. A hero to anyone who ever tried to write a joke."
Jack Dee wrote of his "great and lasting contribution" to British comedy. David Walliams said: "Thank you so much for the immense joy you brought us all Eddie Braben."
Richard Herring wrote: "RIP Eddie Braben – so much of Morecambe and Wise's success down to his advice, wit + comedic vision." And David Baddiel, with a nod to arguably Braben's most famous sketch, tweeted: "Eddie Braben: a man who, comically, played all the right notes, in the right order, all the time. RIP: and many thanks."
Sir Bruce Forsyth, who worked with Braben on Play Your Cards Right, said: "What he did for Eric and Ernie was incredible. He was the third man of the comedy.
"I wish I could have been doing the kind of shows he had written. His jokes and style of writing will be sorely missed in the business."
Fellow Liverpudlian Ken Dodd, who Braben also wrote for, said: "He was a brilliant comic scriptwriter and a brilliant man. He made me laugh a great deal. He was a wonderful writer. He had a very good, down-to-earth approach to humour, and he was never satirical or vulgar."
In an article for the Guardian's TV site, Simon Blackwell, writer on The Thick of It, Veep and Peep Show, said: "Eddie Braben's work for Morecambe and Wise ranks among the best and funniest of any British comic writing because in many ways it defines it. Braben's rhythms are the quintessential rhythms of British comedy – the comedy of bathos."
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'Next!': the secretive world of casting directors
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:30pm
Casting directors are among the most powerful figures in showbusiness, able to make or break careers. But what exactly do they do? Laura Barnett talks auditions, callbacks – and tears
Up in his office on the sixth floor of the Palace theatre, in the heart of London's theatreland, Stephen Crockett is letting me in on a secretive world. The walls are lined with posters for hit shows he has worked on: from Chicago to almost every Andrew Lloyd Webber musical; from Mamma Mia! to Jerry Springer: The Opera. His desk is buried beneath piles of newspapers, CVs and headshots. But – showing me a photograph of performer Dianne Pilkington, just cast in Mamma Mia! – he assures me it's organised chaos. This is the mysterious world of the casting director.
They are rarely interviewed. Few people outside theatre, film and TV know who they are. Yet casting directors rank among the most influential operators in showbusiness. As the people who find the right actors for plays, TV series, adverts and films, they stand between every young actor and that big break. As an actor friend told me: "Casting directors are the gatekeepers. If they don't know who you are, it can feel impossible to get a decent part."
So who are they, and what do they do? To find out, I tracked down four. As well as Crockett, who casts musicals as part of Grindrod Associates, they are: Andy Pryor, whose film and TV work includes Doctor Who; Wendy Spon, head of casting at the National Theatre; and Lucinda Syson, who has cast Hollywood films such as Batman Begins, Troy and X-Men. They are sadly unanimous on one thing: I won't be attending auditions. As one of them puts it: "Asking an actor if they mind someone sitting in is a bit like asking a woman if she minds someone watching her gynaecological examination." I'll take that as a no.
In his eyrie on the sixth floor, Crockett tells me that casting for a musical takes about six weeks. "We send a breakdown of the characters we need to a number of agents – usually between 200 and 300. Within a day or so, hundreds of envelopes arrive back. We divide them into characters and go through every CV, deciding who to call." For a major show, Crockett might receive 1,000 CVs; from these, he'll choose around 500 performers for the first round of auditions, then whittle those down to a shortlist of "recalls". These last auditions are usually attended by a show's director, who will make the final choices.
It's a dizzying task, made harder by the sheer volume of performers around today: when Crockett started out a decade ago, Spotlight, the directory that actors pay to join, was just one volume – for both men and women. Now, there are five volumes for each gender, updated annually (two actors per page, with a headshot and brief CV), and an ever-expanding website. There are also a huge number of actors' agencies. "Agents pop up like weeds, frankly," Crockett says. There are, he says, only around 50 agencies he takes seriously. "Essentially, from a casting point of view, you're going to go with somebody you trust."
Actors without an agent will try to get in touch with casting directors off their own bat. This isn't frowned upon, or at least not exactly: most casting directors' email addresses are listed in the Actors' Yearbook. But they don't go out of their way to publicise their details. "If people really wanted to get hold of us, they would know how to," Andy Pryor tells me in his office (this one more neatly ordered than Crockett's) in London's Clerkenwell. "But we're not going to put our street address on everything, because we are inundated – we get around 10 emails from actors a day, plus hard-copy CVs."
Some actors even send presents. Pryor grimaces. "The worst," he says, "is when you get a card with a teabag in it, and the card is filled with glitter – so that when you open it, it goes all over you. They say, 'We just wanted to get your attention.' It's like, 'Yes you did. Now we've got to clean this shit up.'"
Pryor has occasionally called in an actor on the strength of an unsolicited CV, but the usual process is, again, to go through trusted agents, or to invite performers he's seen on stage. Pryor trained as a stage manager, and worked at London's Bush and Royal Court theatres before becoming a casting director (there is no formal training). He goes to see plays, especially new ones, three or four nights a week, always talent-spotting: not long ago, he and his assistant spotted Jack Farthing at the Royal Court. They cast him first in a small role in Stephen Poliakoff's series Dancing on the Edge, followed by a bigger part in the BBC1 comedy Blandings. "Theatre is where you see people at their best," Pryor says. "You often see actors playing very much against type: that way, you get a great idea of their range."
What comes through most strongly, in talking to Crockett and Pryor, is how much they love actors: how far from secretive and intimidating they strive to be. At the National, Wendy Spon, arguably the most influential casting director in British theatre today, gives the same impression. "You have to like actors and value what they do," she says. "And want them to feel comfortable and nurtured. When they come for auditions, we meet them at the lift, give them water, tell them what to expect. Nerves do funny things to people. We've had a few people cry."
As a public institution, the National may have more of a responsibility to be clear about its process – yet no contact details for Spon and her team are listed on the theatre's website. The workings of, say, the literary department are much more obvious, with clear instructions on how to submit a play. Spon explains that the casting section is being reworked, adding: "We do have a responsibility to be available to people. We don't do open calls, but actors can invite us to see plays: we read everything we receive, and we're out seeing hundreds of plays every year. We're not intentionally mysterious. I'd be disappointed if people felt they were knocking on a door that was never open."
How does a casting director go from looking at a CV, a headshot, or even an actor on stage, to deciding that they're the embodiment of a character? I'm struck by how much of this seems to hinge on instinct. Spon points out, however, that it's the director's instinct that ultimately counts. "It's not about my vision," she says. "I could read a play and think, 'Oh, the perfect person for this part is whoever.' And then the director says, 'I see it like this.'"
Casting a major feature film involves walking an even more precarious tightrope between filming schedules, actors' availability and studios' tastes, as Lucinda Syson explains in her tiny attic office in Soho. We talk in the "taping room", where auditions are filmed; one wall is light blue, apparently the most flattering colour for skin. "Many producers look at casting," says Syson, "and think of it as just finding people for individual roles. It's actually about a total alchemy. You've got to be able to tune into the director – to where they're shooting, to what the undertones and sense of the project are."
With a Hollywood film, the casting process usually takes three months; for a European movie, it can be up to a year. Like the other casting directors, Syson works through agents, but does sometimes hold "generals": meetings where an agent sends in an actor in the hope that something suitable might be coming up. Britain's Aaron Taylor-Johnson came in for a general just before Syson started casting 2010's Kick-Ass, and got a lead part. "I was literally sharpening a pencil," Syson says, "and his agent sent him in. It was unusually good timing."
I quiz all four casting directors on the perils of typecasting. Many of the non-white actors I've interviewed over the years have felt excluded from lead roles, or confined to stereotypical parts. They all say they think about this a lot – and that things are changing for the better. "Most people working on our side of the industry," says Pryor, "have a completely open mind – it's just about finding the right person at the right time. And it's a much better time now for actors from ethnic minorities. There was a time when only white, middle-class kids thought they could be actors. Now, we have more black actors coming through."
Spon has one final reflection on her role. "It's a curious job. You're in a position of influence but not power: we don't ultimately decide who gets the job, but we can influence who's in the frame. It's not just about having an opinion – it's about having an informed opinion based on seeing work over a number of years." She laughs. "That's quite a hard slog."
Laura Barnettguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Categories: Art Wire
Ray Manzarek, 74, Rock Keyboardist And a Founder of the Doors, Is Dead
NY Times Arts - May 21, 2013 - 1:15pm
Mr. Manzarek played a key role in creating the group’s psychedelic sound, which could be haunted, meditative and circuslike, but which was also widely imitated.
Categories: Art Wire
The Postal Service – review
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:10pm
Brixton Academy, London
It's fitting that the stage set resembles a neon cathedral and the intro tape is church music, because Brixton has come to worship. In 2003 a long-distance collaboration-by-post between Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel and Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard produced Give Up, the one and thus far only album by the Postal Service. One low-key tour and the band was done; the album, however, wasn't. As the most successful melding of indie rock and laptop electronica to date – two genres that had been flirting awkwardly for a decade but never properly getting it on – it grew an avid cult following fascinated by its air of subdued rave romance. Electronica had never sounded so vulnerable, so human.
Ten years on, a second album is so long-awaited they're calling it indie's Chinese Democracy. Instead there's an anniversary rerelease for Give Up, two new songs and this reunion tour, where we can see first-hand why the Postal Service deliver. It's down to immaculate balance; both Tamborello's glitch frenzies and Gibbard's delicate, airy melodies are given equal billing and respect, and each embraces rather than tries to assimilate the other's style.
For Gibbard, most famous for Death Cab's suicide pact anthem I Will Follow You Into the Dark, playing at being Neil Tennant is a rare chance for frivolity. He's driven to itchy bouts of dad dancing by the subway rattles and pounding rave climaxes, duets with a sample of himself on Such Great Heights and occasionally dashes to a drum kit to add beef to the beat. These are also some of his most colourful tunes: We Will Become Silhouettes concerns an airborne virus that makes you explode, Such Great Heights pays tribute to our alien overseers and Nothing Better is a song-row between splitting partners that is performed like a Mensa redraft of Meat Loaf's Dead Ringer For Love, with Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis taking the role of Cher. The swamp noir drips and squelches of This Place Is a Prison provide dark relief, but as Brand New Colony turns the stage into the world's biggest Simon Says machine, TPS prove themselves the full pop package.
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Goran Bregović – review
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 1:02pm
Royal Festival Hall, London
Goran Bregović was a rock star in the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, but he has since moved on to become a successful if controversial exponent of Balkan Gypsy music. Although he doesn't actually come from a Gypsy family, his international career has been based around reworking Gypsy styles for the mass market – and doing so despite complaints of plagiarism, to which he answers "I borrow from traditional material".
His career has been helped by his film work, particularly for Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, and he began this London concert with a series of mood pieces that were finely performed by the vocalists, but ranged from the epic to the soporific, and needed a film to accompany them.
On this current tour, he is backed by the 18 musicians and singers of his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra as well as a string quartet, five brass players, a drummer, two female singers in Gypsy costumes and a six-piece male choir in dinner jackets. Bregović, dressed sharply in a white suit, took centre stage perched on a stool with his electric guitar.
What his adoring audience really wanted was a Gypsy knees-up, and of course he obliged. The lengthy set was carefully constructed to include regular bursts of rapid-fire brassy dance songs, but he failed to match the invention or enthusiasm of the greatest Balkan Gypsy bands, Fanfare Ciocărlia or Boban and Marko Marković. The best sections had nothing to do with either his arty compositions or frantic Gypsy dance. Irish singer Selina O'Leary was brought on to perform Bregović's new Champagne for Gypsies, but she was even better with a Gypsy-influenced version of The Galway Girl. Bregović later followed with an unlikely treatment of Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya, and a slinky In the Death Car, which he wrote and recorded with Iggy Pop. And now he really did sound original.
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Categories: Art Wire
China Builds Museums, But Filling Them Is Another Story
NPR Arts and Culture - May 21, 2013 - 12:58pm
China has been building museums with abandon, opening about 100 annually in recent years. Two of the biggest opened on the same day last fall on opposite banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River. But filling these museums — with both art and visitors — is proving more challenging.
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Falstaff – review
The Guardian Culture - May 21, 2013 - 12:46pm
Glyndebourne Opera House, Lewes
Richard Jones's production of Falstaff first appeared at Glyndebourne four years ago with, by all accounts, a few rough edges. But in its latest incarnation, which has been revived by Sarah Fahie, everything falls perfectly into place. In Ultz's designs, Jones's updating to late-1940s austerity Britain is a gently affectionate dissection of the English class system, from top-hatted Eton schoolboys to mischievous Brownies, from the crumbling foundations of John Falstaff's own aristocratic background through the aggressive middle-class aspirations of the Fords, still digging for victory in their suburban garden, to the streetwise opportunism of Pistol and Bardolph.
From the animatronic cats to the well-drilled rowing crew, everything is beautifully observed; none of the humour is forced, and musically it unfolds just as naturally and unselfconsciously, too. The credit for that goes to Mark Elder, whose account of the score is witty, buoyant and wonderfully humane, missing nothing. He is conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and while their period instruments do not alter the soundworld radically, there are enough shifts of emphasis to create some unexpectedly new perspectives and bring a transparency that suits the generally light-voiced cast perfectly.
Laurent Naouri is the Falstaff this time, with just enough sense of old-world privilege to make his disdain for Graham Clark's Dr Caius dismissively haughty, and enough surviving charm to make his pursuit of the Windsor wives not entirely fanciful. Ailyn Pérez is Alice, Lucia Cirillo is Meg (the decrepit husband Jones invents for her is a nice touch); Susanne Resmark is the formidable ATS-uniformed Mistress Quickly. Roman Burdenko's rather unconvincing and almost wordless Ford is a disappointment, but the young lovers, Antonio Poli and Elena Tsallagova, make a beautifully matched couple. It is altogether a captivating, joyous evening.
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