FWSO’S NEW PREZ. Amy Adkins was actually appointed the president of the Fort Worth Symphony back in January, replacing Ann Koonsman who was retiring after 30 years in the post. But she officially took charge last week, so the Star-Telegram profiles an orchestra leader it calls “fearless” (not every 42-year-old symphony CEO has jumped out of an airplane). She’ll need it, though, considering the FWSO has lost $750,000 in revenues the past three years. She’s begun working with “a strategic planning team” from the Kennedy Center to devise a financial plan from Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center.

BESS, YOU IS GOIN’ TO BROADWAY NOW. Dallas actor Cedric Neal, you surely recall, has been cast as Frazier in the “re-imagined’ Porgy and Bess — now officially titled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess — debuting at the American Rep in Cambridge August 17th before opening on Broadway in January. The NYTimes has a preview feature on the changes being wrought to the American classic.

THE WOMAN WHO MADE THE LAST PICTURE SHOW LOOK AS GOOD AS IT DID. Polly Platt was the production designer and uncredited costume designer for the great 1971 film adaptation of the Larry McMurtry novel. Working with director Peter Bogdanovich, her second husband, she went over every shot with him — on this film and on Paper Moon, says The Guardian. It was Platt, for instance, who noticed Cybill Shepherd on a magazine cover and suggested her to play Jacy — thus setting up the end of her own marriage when Bogdanovich had an affair with Shepherd. Platt, 72, has died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

DID IT WITH PAINT ROLLERS. Former colleague Betsy Lewis over on Glasstire has assembled amusing videos and images of actors portraying great painters, with the centerpiece being a comparison of Eric Idle’s Michelangelo vs. Charlton Heston considering the Sistine Chapel ceiling in The Agony and the Ecstasy: Funny or funni-er? Personally, I prefer Eddie Izzard’s house-painter Buonarroti (adult language, natch, which is why it’s not embedded here).