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The Met Opera opens its season Tuesday with a new Macbeth directed by Louisa Proske, co-founder of Heartbeat Opera, the small New York company she has run since 2014. She got the job less than a year out, after the original director withdrew; new Met productions are normally planned two or more years ahead (The New York Times).
Arts Council England’s new chair, Dawn Airey, a former Channel 5 chief, released the council’s first survey of children’s cultural life: in the past year 52% had been to a museum, 26% to a gallery, 22% to a live music event, and 32% named cost as what kept them away. Not good enough, she says. She found the ACE office “quiet, a little bit subdued” and wants it to “be loud” (The Guardian).
MrBeast, with 515 million YouTube subscribers, and James Patterson, with 425 million books sold, published a novel together. It sold 22,646 copies in its first week; Patterson’s previous co-written book, with Viola Davis, sold 57,454 (Ben Liebmann, LinkedIn). So the world’s biggest YouTube star doesn’t translate into books?
Jared Harbour, a theatre writer on Substack, obtained the capitalization documents for Second Stage’s The Fantasticks: investors’ $1 million is booked as a “non-recourse loan” to the nonprofit, and their 25.6% profit share is exactly $1 million divided by the $3.91 million budget (Jared Harbour). What, he asks, actually is the business model for non-profit theatre?
More than 100 children auditioned for José Mateo Ballet Theatre’s 38th Nutcracker in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One 7-year-old’s dream role is a rat: “it makes you laugh a lot” (Boston Globe).
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