All stories by Douglas McLennan on BroadwayStars

Monday, April 4, 2016

What Is Greatness? – Six Highlights From This Week’s ArtsJournal 04.03.16 by Douglas McLennan

A number of stories this week tackled the meaning of greatness in art (even if they didn’t explicitly frame it that way). A changing culture requires changing definitions of greatness,…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:14AM
Sunday, March 27, 2016

The Existential Arts – This Week’s Best Reads On ArtsJournal (03.27.16) by Douglas McLennan

This week’s best reads hover around existential questions. What arts organizations should exist? Does truth exist? Can theatre really change anything, and should it even try? Canada…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:57PM
Sunday, March 20, 2016

The Five Most-Interesting Stories We Collected On ArtsJournal This Week 03.20.16 by Douglas McLennan

My picks for the five most interesting stories we gathered this week. The Arts’ Existential Challenge Arts organizations, along with every business sector trying to cope with sweeping …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:15PM
Sunday, March 13, 2016

Five Highlights From Last Week’s ArtsJournal by Douglas McLennan

Researchers find links between what you watch and how you behave, how women are changing classical music, fascinating fights over who owns Picasso, a Golden Age for New York theatre, and con…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:39PM
Sunday, March 6, 2016

Five Highlights From This Week’s ArtsJournal by Douglas McLennan

New York gets its first new major museum in decades. English National Opera continues its slow-motion implosion. The relationship between art and critics frays. Some counter-intuitive findin…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:46PM
Sunday, February 28, 2016

This Week’s Top AJ Stories 2.28.16 by Douglas McLennan

Arguably, the dominant cultural issue of our time is the changes in how people are finding and getting culture.  In response, business models supporting culture and the kinds of culture bei…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:31PM
Sunday, February 21, 2016

Five ArtsJournal Stories From This Week You Shouldn’t Miss (2.21.16) by Douglas McLennan

1. Is Funding Really The Top Issue In The Arts?  Doug Borwick says no. “Insufficiency of funds will never go away. It’s a state of being in the nonprofit sector. Overfocus on this a…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:22PM
Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Get Your Damn Ads Out Of My Social Media! (They Don’t Work Anyway) by Douglas McLennan

Anyone you know like ads? No. They’re the cackling crows getting between you and what you’re after. They’re uninvited, unwelcome, and we do whatever we can to swat them awa…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:14AM
Monday, February 15, 2016

The “One New Thing” Rule by Douglas McLennan

Adam Grant, in his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World writes about the necessity of anchoring new ideas in familiar things. To generate creative ideas, it’s importan…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:32PM
Sunday, February 14, 2016

Editors’ Choice: Some ArtsJournal Stories You Shouldn’t Miss From The Past Week by Douglas McLennan

1. This week in What-Does-The-Audience-Want? Cheaper tickets, for sure. Or at least the opportunity to pay what they want.  One theatre converted its season to pay-as-you-want and saw a 50%…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:12PM
Sunday, February 7, 2016

Five ArtsJournal Stories You Shouldn’t Miss This Week by Douglas McLennan

Ah, an old-fashioned press-banning. Feels like the good old days. Of the 162 stories we collected this week, a few memes emerged: It was the week of artistic directors in dance. First, Be…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:56PM
Thursday, February 4, 2016

We Asked: What’s the Biggest Challenge Facing the Arts? by Douglas McLennan

Last week we conducted our first ArtsJournal poll, asking: What’s the biggest challenge facing the arts? We had 3,191 votes, with the largest percentage – 37% – answering f…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:38AM
Sunday, January 31, 2016

@AJDoug’s Top Arts and Culture Stories of the Week for 01.31.16 by Douglas McLennan

A new music director at the New York Phil. Some things we're learning about audiences. Some ways of analyzing writing. And the police who mistake a man singing opera for urgent screaming.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:02PM
Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The Virtual Arts – Have It Your Way? by Douglas McLennan

C-NET came away from this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas pronouncing that virtual reality is going to displace traditional porn. No surprise that the porn industry lead…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:08PM
Sunday, January 24, 2016

FIVE PICKS: Stories From This Week’s ArtsJournal by Douglas McLennan

Welcome to our weekly “best of” ArtsJournal. These aren’t necessarily the most important of the 156 stories we found this week, but these particularly caught our eye. Your …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:56PM
Thursday, January 21, 2016

What Makes A Great Blog(ger)? Five Observations by Douglas McLennan

As inconsistent and distracted a blogger as I am, I am hardly a great blogger. But as someone who runs a network of arts blogs, I do have some observations. Great bloggers don’t just g…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:09PM
Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Playing For The Screens – Is Our Obsession With Video Changing The Live Arts Experience? by Douglas McLennan

One weekend last November, the biggest box-office at movie theatres throughout the UK wasn’t for the latest Hollywood blockbuster (the latest “Hunger Games” movie opened th…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:28PM
Tuesday, January 19, 2016

If Dance Can’t Pay Its Dancers What Does It Mean To Be A Professional Dancer? by Douglas McLennan

A survey of dancers in the UK  last summer reported that “more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5,000 a year from their performance work.” That’s profes…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:08PM

Last Week’s Top Stories on ArtsJournal by Douglas McLennan

We’re aggregating upwards of 150 stories a week on ArtsJournal these days. Despite the decimation of the daily newspaper arts journalism profession, there are more good stories about t…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:16AM
Monday, January 11, 2016

When Libraries Realize That The Most Valuable Thing They Own Isn’t Their Collections by Douglas McLennan

Remember when the internet came along and everyone wondered whether there would still be a use for libraries? Oddly, just as the question was being called, in the early 2000s there was a bui…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:15PM
Monday, January 4, 2016

Is Earning Making Money The New Audience-Building Strategy? by Douglas McLennan

Maybe it’s obvious, but in the for-profit world, making money is the point; profit defines success. In the non-profit world, the relationship between profit and success is more complic…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:09PM
Monday, December 7, 2015

The Innovation Imperative (But Will It Get Us An Audience?) by Douglas McLennan

Recently, an orchestra manager told me that his orchestra was going to be “the most innovative orchestra in the world.” I asked what he was doing that was so innovative, and he r…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:57AM
Monday, November 30, 2015

The Mass Market Ain’t What It Used To Be (And What That Means For The Arts) by Douglas McLennan

What does it mean to “engage with an audience”? It’s a fundamental question for anyone who makes anything. Whether it’s a political party trying to win votes, Coke tr…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:13PM
Friday, September 4, 2015

Rules Of Engagement: The Line Between Audience Participation And Abuse by Douglas McLennan

“The rules of engagement in theatre have changed, and now audience participation is everywhere. But artists have a responsibility to take care of those they pick on.”

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 02:25PM
Thursday, September 3, 2015

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Has Been Focused On Diversity. Here’s How It’s Going… by Douglas McLennan

“Once settled in your seat, I suspect the first thing you’d notice would be the unusual ethnic and racial diversity onstage.”

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:56AM
Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Edinburgh Festivals Post (Yet Another) Record Year At The Box Office by Douglas McLennan

“The fringe broke the 2 million barrier for the second year in a row, recording a rise of 5.24% on last year’s figures to 2,298,080, on an increase in productions of 3.79% to 3,3…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:01PM
Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Is Broadway Due For A Big Market Correction Of Its Own? by Douglas McLennan

“I’m not trying to tell you the sky is falling . . . I’m here to say that what goes up, must come down (or in our case, go flat), and the more we know and understand when these thi…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:45PM
Friday, August 28, 2015

Director Accuses Theatre Of “Setting A Dangerous Precedent” By Cancelling ISIS Play by Douglas McLennan

“If a single company gets scared and it is willing to pull work that it has invested time and money and love into… that is a very dangerous precedent.”

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:13PM
Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Ten Agatha Christie Plays Discovered by Douglas McLennan

The ten plays – five full-length and five one-act works – were discovered by producer Julius Green while researching a book about the author’s work in theatre. He heralded the find as …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:57PM
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Reporter Wants More Impact For His Blockbuster Story, So He Turns To Theatre by Douglas McLennan

“Assassination Theater, now in a run at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, is a provocative multimedia history lesson dressed up as a docudrama. An engrossing, rapid-fire exposé …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:13PM
Friday, August 21, 2015

Manhattan Theatre Club Attacked For Lack Of Diversity by Douglas McLennan

The season, announced piecemeal since December, includes Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Ripcord,” Richard Greenberg’s “Our Mother’s Brief Affair,”…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:23PM

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