#robert brustein

[jdvancefreefeetpics]

I found this caption I wrote for a link I posted a while back. The last sentence is perhaps the best thing I have ever written.

[shakespearenews]

Not Much Ado After All

On the evidence of their current showing on Broadway, the R.S.C. has fallen from its ensemble ideals into mere spectacle and showmanship.

Robert Brustein in 1985

Much Ado About Nothing is distinguished by Ralph Koltai’s beautiful setting—a high-tech exterior of transparent and reflective mirrors, decorated with burnished etchings of Japanese trees. At the very beginning a striking female cellist sits on a bench beside the tree and plays some mournful music. It is a lovely moment. Nothing in the production ever matches it. One major difficulty is that the purpose of the setting is never established. One anticipates a new avenue into the play; what one gets is just another pretty decoration, later embellished with revolving balloons and twinkling stars. But where are we? And who are all these people? The costumes seem like 19th-century Italian and Spanish adaptations, the period dances are performed with masks and swordplay (a new R.S.C. principle—when in doubt, fence), but nobody has troubled to investigate why Shakespeare set his play in Messina or what may lurk under the surface of the wit contests, horseplay, and melodramatic con-frontations.

[robinsonaden]

An American giant in her dotage weighs in on success, fear, love, and idealism.

MN: I think the truth is, nobody really knows whether they can survive an artistic failure. I worry about that. But people keep saying, “But Marsha, you’re so strong…”

LH: Oh, they always will, darling. Any successful woman they’ll always talk about this way. It’s partly to put you down, I must warn you. It’s not always entirely admiration. It’s probably to make you feel that they’re tiny and attractive, and you’re the strongest, most miserable piece of fascist violence ever put on earth.

MN: Is there a good way to deal with that?

LH: I don’t listen to it any more. When men do it, it’s for another reason. But when women do it, it’s exactly what I describe, to say “I’m pretty and so darling and look at you, over there earning a living. And you’re powerful and ugly and miserable.”

[366days366musicals]

Always a party at the end of the show.

[366days366musicals]

Production footage, unfortunately not easy to hear beneath the Russian. I’m the one pushing the wheelchair and one of the ones pulling the tarps and rocks. 

[algebraicvarietyshow]

For the first time in recent memory, popular music has discarded intelligibility, even on the most basic level. Beginning by ignoring language, rock and roll is now dispensing with melodic content and offering only animal sounds and repetitive rhythms.

1958

[globalstagespitt-blog]

“I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth. As there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life, these men and women found themselves to be sufficient and secure in their art and their instructions.”

[besmirchthis]

oh my god shut the fuck up robert brustein.

(editing to note that 'subsidized separatism' was even more painfully absurd than i'd remembered.)