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The Thursday Roundup!


by Jerome Weeks 1 Nov 2012 7:00 AM

Critics are completely in the dark in Fort Worth, the state’s big literary festival loses a director and if you want to pull off an arts festival, go big: That’s what you’ve got in this morning’s roundup.

CTA TBD

CRITICS IN THE DARK (as usual?). We’re sure you recall the noisy radio piece we did on Amphibian Productions’ new home near downtown Fort Worth and the unusual play the company revived for their theater’s debut, Shaun Prendergast’s The True History of the Tragic Life & Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World. Based on a real-life Mexican woman who traveled the world as a circus freak, the play is performed entirely in the pitch-black dark, meaning only voices and sound effects create everything. The general consensus among the reviewers – like Punch Shaw and Jimmy Fowler and Lawson Taitte (pay wall) — is that the staging’s a gimmick, but a good one that the ‘Phibs handle well.

RUMORED LAST WEEK BUT NOW IT’S OFFICIAL. I took a quick trip to Austin last weekend and heard from a friend that Clay Smith, who’s been the literary director of the Texas Book Festival since 2005, would be moving on. Michael Merschel reports it’s true and that Smith is heading over to become the features editor at the Austin-based Kirkus Reviews. (Clay started life as a book critic, so it’s something of a homecoming.) Think you can run a lit fest that fills the Texas Capitol with 240 authors? The job’s posted at Publisher’s Weekly.

REMEMBER THE HORTON FOOTE FESTIVAL? SORTA LIKE THAT.  Last year’s Horton Foote Festival was the largest collaboration among North Texas theater companies (17 of them), ever — and deservedly, it got a fair amount of attention. Imagine if North Texas art museums tried something similar. Well, they did in LA. Sixty Southern California arts institutions collaborated for Pacific Standard Time, a sprawling series of events and shows about the development of the LA art scene, 1945-1980. The Getty Museum invested $12 million in PST, and it also commissioned a study that now suggests (it’s complicated) the whole deal generated some $111 million in cultural tourism spending. So there. A big deal.

 

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About Jerome Weeks

Jerome Weeks is the Senior Arts Reporter/Producer for KERA. Previously at The Dallas Morning News, he was the book columnist for 10 years and the drama critic for 10 years before that. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Theatre and Men’s Vogue magazines. View more about Jerome Weeks.

COMMENTS

  • Scott Cantrell

    On your third post…
    It’s an enduring frustration to me that there’s so little collaboration among Dallas arts institutions–even between the DSO and Dallas Opera. They’re missing so many opportunities to create interest and pool marketing effforts.

  • JeromeWeeks

    Interesting you should mention that. TACA just held one of its annual powwows, called Perforum, dedicated to the entire topic of collaboration, and they had a panel of invited guests, including people who run the Lincoln Center Festival and Spoleto. Much talk about how collaboration is pretty much the order of the day these days, not just as a one-off project. They can be an efficient use of limited funding, a good way to cross-pollinate audiences, etc. Major reason for the panel, of course, is that the very nature of the Arts District and the AT&T PAC encourage collaborations, festivals and the like. Drawbacks and fundamental reasons organizations resist (generally, the staff is already stretched to its limits) were also aired. But we may see something constructive come out of Perforum.