A cleareyed examination of the economic fragility of cultural institutions.
The failure of the New York City Opera stands as a cautionary tale for other performing arts companies.
Veteran Wall Street Journal opera critic Waleson (Music Criticism/San Francisco Conservatory of Music) makes her book debut with a thorough recounting of the tumultuous history of the New York City Opera, from its hopeful founding as the People’s Opera in 1943 to its sputtering demise in 2013. Championed by New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the opera was meant for audiences who could not afford the ticket prices charged by the Metropolitan Opera. Housed in a dilapidated former temple on Manhattan’s 55th Street, the NYCO rented out space to other arts companies and borrowed scenery and costumes in order to keep ticket prices low. Since opera is “the most notoriously expensive of all art forms,” the NYCO knew that it risked financial loss. Throughout its history, it scrambled for funding from foundations, philanthropists, and grants. Since it could never afford the major stars who sang at the Met, the NYCO hired beginning singers, who were grateful for employment and the chance of being discovered. By the 1960s, one performer shone: soprano Beverly Sills, who became a “repertory driver, with new operas mounted to showcase roles she wanted to sing.” In 1979, Sills took on the directorship of the NYCO. By then, she was famous, but she was hardly ready to confront the company’s severe financial deficit. Changing demographics (the company’s older audience was dying out), “threadbare artistic level” (even after a move to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center), and erratic programming reduced the number of ticket holders. Waleson documents the productions, financial struggles, changing roster of ineffectual directors, and boards comprised “of mostly well-intentioned people who were paralyzed by inertia” as forces that led the NYCO finally to declare bankruptcy. She notes with cautious optimism that festivals, art centers, and small, nimble companies—including a recently resurrected City Opera—are striving valiantly to keep opera alive.
A cleareyed examination of the economic fragility of cultural institutions.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-497-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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