The Ghastly Impermanence: BBC World Service Radio Archive Goes Beta
The BBC have announced a prototype website covering the past sixty years of BBC World Service Broadcasts, including over eight hundred radio plays among the 70,000 pieces in the archive. This is an extraordinary effort and deserves the highest attention and even a little begrudging praise from those like me who tend to be naysayers wherever Auntie is concerned.
The Ghastly Impermanence: The BBC Audio Drama Awards and Predictable Shock
Thoughts on this year’s BBC Audio Drama Awards.
The Seagull Project: A Method to the Madness
The production is three-quarters pure genius and one-quarter excellence. One can hardly complain about that mixture. The whole production gives me an optimism about the stage that maybe other companies will finally try to make a break from the petrifying effects of “seasons” and “shows” and rediscover what the San Francisco Actors Workshop under Herbert Blau and Jules Irving knew back in the 1950s: the play is the thing, and it is ready when it is ready.
Crave More and the In-Between
Whim W’him’s Crave More is a program of four dances with quite different thematic approaches. Overall the program is strong, but I have some reservations.
Free Radicals: A Personal Avant-Garde
I went into Pip Chodorov’s Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film with reserved judgment. What I found while watching the film was that it is a film of incredibly narrow range.
The 2012 Gypsy Awards Announce Their Winning Contestants
Another day, another award ceremony. The Seattle Theater Writers Critics’ Circle reveal their winners’ slate for the second annual Gypsy Rose Lee Awards.
The Rest is Dullness: Hamlet at Ghost Light Theatricals
Audiences are entitled to play that has been interpreted. Having gone just so far with her “big choice,” Ms. Raas-Berquist fails to go any farther. But a choice is not an interpretation. An interpretation requires that an idea be pursued. Gender-swapping Hamlet is not an idea; it is merely a conceit.
Catherine Cabeen Fires Away
Fire! is a beautiful piece that is complete within its limitation, but I am not sure the limitation is final. I am not sure Ms. Cabeen is done with Niki de Saint Phalle–or perhaps that Niki de Saint Phalle is not done with Ms. Cabeen.
A.D. Coleman’s Light Readings: Criticism as an Ethical Practice
I believe critics have an ethical duty not merely to their readers but also to the art itself. It is their sworn duty to illuminate rather than obfuscate. It is also their sworn duty to protect their art from political and social chicanery. That I believe any of this stems largely from my intellectual encounters with A.D. Coleman over the years.
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