• Texas greatest living playwright — certainly the most polite and gentlemanly — is 92. And Horton Foote is back on Broadway, the first time since his Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Young Man from Atlanta, in 1997.
• Want to hear a story? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology — with some Hollywood funding — has established the Center for Future Storytelling: “The Center for Future Storytelling is a sign of the times. The notion that the narrative arts are under threat from information overload, shrinking attention spans, text messaging, social networking sites and slam-bam CGI blockbusters is one widely given voice. What’s so odd is that the remedies proposed, as often as not, seem to involve a massive increase in just such things.”
• The Grinch-like economy means no black-and-white show this season from Kurt Kleinmann and the Pegasus Theatre. Kleinmann announced in a press release that he won’t be staging one of his black-and-white movie spoofs, a holiday tradition at the Eisemann Center. On the other hand, he’s in talks with “an experienced tour producer” to take one of his comedies around to mid-sized Texas towns — beginning with Dallas: “And best of all, the venues we will perform in are renovated vaudeville and old movie theaters across the state, a perfect setting for the Black & White shows which are designed to look like old movies come to life on stage. ” No word on when, though.
• Seems the Texas Ballet Theater’s Nutcracker has proved to be a dream come true for the financially troubled dance troupe. So say the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. But then, both reviews were the same one , written by Chris Shull. The same is also true of Scott Cantrell’s review of Die Fledermaus, which appears in both places. Thought something like this might happen one day, given the newspapers’ cutbacks in arts coverage. Hadn’t expected it so soon.

Image of Horton Foote from tablerock.org.