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☆ ‘Tortured Poets Department’: A listener’s guide to references hidden in Taylor Swift’s lyrics
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-20 | by ( Alli Rosenbloom | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +14 min

CNN —Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, a 31-track surprise double album, and she’s clearly in an emotionally evolved era. Either way, as the title suggests in this song, she’s determined to get him back. ‘I Hate it Here’“This place made me feel worthless,” Swift sings. Others have connected the Cassandra that Swift sings about to the figure in Greek mythology, a priestess whose accurate prophecies were not believed. ‘The Bolter’“As she was leaving it felt like breathing,” Swift sings.

Persons: CNN — Taylor Swift, Department ”, you’ll, Post Malone, Swift, “, pining, ” “ I’ve, ”, ‘, Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn, Healy, Lucy, Jack –, Lucy Dacus, Jack Antonoff, –, Charlie Puth, ” Swift, iHeartRadio, ’, Alwyn, Swift’s, Taylor Swift, Christopher Polk, Orville Peck, Florence, Florence Welch, you’d, Welch, Emma Stone, “ Who’s, Edward Albee’s, Virginia Woolf, We’ve, Rich Polk, Aaron Dessner, ” Ouch, frontman’s, Travis Kelce, ‘ Clara Bow ’, Stevie Nicks –, Ryan Reynolds ’, Clara Bow, Swift longingly, doesn’t, ’ Swift, ‘ Nuff, Chloe, Sam, Sophia, Marcus ’, Reynolds, Blake Lively’s, Betty, James, Inez –, you’re, Kelce, Ezra Shaw, aIMee ’, Aimee, Kim Kardashian, she’s, “ KIM, you’ve, ‘ Cassandra ’, Kardashian, Cassandra, ‘ Peter ’, Peter Pan, Peter ”, Peter, Dessner, ‘ Robin ’ Organizations: CNN, Department, GQ, NBC, NBCU, Bank, Getty, YouTube, Kansas City Chiefs, San Francisco 49ers, Marvel, Windows, Disney Locations: British, London, Beverly Hills, ‘ Florida, Florida, Anaheim, London’s Vauxhall, Las Vegas, Cardigan

☆ Why ‘Uncle Vanya’ Is the Play for Our Anxious Era
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-21 | by ( Jon Robin Baitz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

IN WATCHING MIXED-BREED dogs play, I’ve often thought that mutts are more dog than the purest purebred. This brings me to Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (1897), a singularly psychologically destabilizing piece of theater that’s now being seen anew as a study of post-Covid paralysis, not to mention the existential dread of watching your life slip away by the spoonful. The pandemic and the boorish political and public discourse that followed drove us inward, unable to fight back, going nuts like poor Vanya. For Uncle Vanya, this situation becomes intolerable, especially after Serebryakov insists that the property be sold and the profits set aside for his comfort. Equally unbearable: the professor’s new wife, Yelena, a detached beauty years his junior who’s driving Vanya and the alcoholic Dr. Astrov, another visitor, batty with lust.

Persons: I’ve, William Shakespeare’s “, Edward Albee’s “, Virginia Woolf ”, —, Anton Chekhov’s “, Vanya ”, that’s, you’re, Vanya, Plotwise, Serebryakov, “, ”, he’s, he’s sponged, Uncle Vanya, Yelena, Astrov, batty, you’d Locations: Moscow

☆ Opinion | American Theater Is Collapsing. The Federal Government Must Save It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-19 | by ( Isaac Butler | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The American theater is on the verge of collapse. The Humana Festival of New American Plays, a vital launching pad for such great playwrights as Lynn Nottage and Will Eno over the past four decades, was canceled this year. This season the Williamstown Theater Festival, one of our most important summer festivals, will consist of only one fully produced work, alongside an anemic offering of staged readings. The Lookingglass, a major anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, is halting production for the year. Nonprofit theaters are where many recent hits — including “A Strange Loop” and “Hamilton,” both of which won Pulitzer Prizes — started out.

Persons: Lynn Nottage, Will Eno, Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Annie Baker, Simon, Garfunkel’s, “, “ Hamilton, ”, — Organizations: Public, New, Williamstown Theater, Oregon Shakespeare, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nonprofit Locations: Oregon, New York

☆ Glenda Jackson, British actor turned politician, dies aged 87
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-15 | by ( Elizabeth Piper | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Raw-boned, pallid and angular, with striking, sharp eyes, she had starred on stage, television and film before quitting to take up politics, declaring: "An actor's life is not interesting". Jackson also won two Emmy awards for her portrayal of England's Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC's 1971 television series "Elizabeth R". After more than three decades on stage and film, Jackson quit acting and took her no-nonsense, straight-talking style into politics. In 1992, at the age of 55, Jackson won a seat in parliament representing the left-of-centre Labour Party in a constituency in north London. In parliament, Jackson was vociferous in her condemnation of the Conservative Party which she accused of instilling a "dreadful, dreadful moral malaise" in Britain.

☆ Glenda Jackson, an Unnervingly Energizing Presence at Every Age
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-15 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

She didn’t so much enter the restaurant as erupt into it, a fast-burning blaze of psychic exasperation that seemed to set the silverware rattling. Glenda Jackson was five minutes late for our meeting, and she looked ferociously disgusted with herself, with the universe, with the “bloody” London transit system and, most likely, with the prospect of having to talk about herself. Such was my first in-the-flesh encounter with Jackson, who died Thursday at the age of 87 and who had seared herself into my teenage consciousness decades earlier as an uncompromisingly modern, sui generis movie star. Waiting for her five years ago in the restaurant of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, I had been prepared to be awed, intimidated, even terrified. What I hadn’t anticipated was how unnervingly energizing the presence of this 81-year-old woman would be.

Persons: Glenda Jackson, Jackson, seared, Edward Albee’s “, Ken Russell’s “, ”, John Schlesinger’s, — Organizations: Broadway Locations: London, Trafalgar

☆ Mary Gordon and Glenda Jackson Talk Poetry, Theater and the State of Feminism
▼ + stars: | 2018-03-21 | by ( Boris Kachka | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Finally, and just as surprisingly, Jackson returned to acting. Just after turning 80 two years ago, she won raves in London as a gender-blind King Lear. One morning in January in Manhattan, Gordon finally met her idol for a long conversation, which covered poetry, film and theater, but most significantly the state of feminism today. GLENDA JACKSON: It doesn’t have that effect on me at all. We’d played it in London to totally silent audiences, but in New York, they applauded the songs; they shouted, “Encore!”MG: Yes, I remember it.

Persons: Mary Gordon, Glenda Jackson, ” Gordon, Jackson, “ Marat, Sade, ”, Gordon, John Schlesinger, Alex, Peter Finch, —, King Lear, Edward Albee’s, MARY GORDON, it’s, GLENDA JACKSON, We’d, Lear Organizations: Company, Women, New York, Broadway Locations: America, London, Manhattan, New York

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