Slightly Later Monday Roundup

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.

Tom Hendricks

You mention that DMN and FWS both had Nutcracker reviews by the same writer.
Does either have a reporter that just covers local artists?
Anne Bothwell

Hi Tom,
I don’t think either paper has a “local artists” beat, but both papers have reporters who cover local arts news, which would include local artists. Jerome’s checking with the Star Telegram and The Morning News to find out more about the same review running in both papers. We’ll let you know what we learn.
Jac Alder

At Theatre Three we worry about printed press (newspaper) trends that are limiting reviews both in terms of number of reviewers to write dramatic criticism and the number of events that getreviewed. What we know is that theatre goers are newspaper readers — lots of evidence from surveys shows that. With all the sympathy for the economic struggles of newspapers, it concerns us to see the two major daily papers “pooling” coverage — or worse yet, not covering productions at all. Neither daily paper has had a critic at our current show, “Season’s Greetings” (in Theatre Too). (if you want to know, it’s “hilarious”!)

Thank goodness we’ve had on line critical coverage for “Season’s Greetings” . For ” The Light in the Piazza”t we had extensive critical coverage due not only to the many on line enterprises that ARE sending critics , but also due to weekly publications that publish on line. So there were about seven different reviewers publishing we reviews.

All this is transition away from arts coverage as we’ve know it for decades to the web world. And look — here we all are! It doesn’t lessen my affection and concern for print media to know how rapidly the public is responding to news and opinion on the web, but it helps my mood. And my business.