Arts News
UK stars reign over US album chart
VIDEO: Will.i.am's new musical machines
Shakira scores World Cup hat-trick
Lindsay Lohan sues over Grand Theft Auto V character
Lindsay Lohan is suing the makers of the hugely popular video game Grand Theft Auto for creating a character that she alleges is based on her own image.
Lohan filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against developer Rockstar Games, claiming it used her likeness for the character of Lacey Jonas without permission in order to boost sales. Citing privacy laws, the actor is claiming unspecified damages from the owner of Rockstar, Take-Two Interactive Software, at the New York supreme court.
Continue reading...British Library to show Declaration
Blotting out memories of Rolf Harris
Dead man building: is Louis Kahn's posthumous New York project his best?
When the American architect Louis Kahn collapsed from a heart attack in the toilets of New York's Penn Station in 1974, he left behind a lot of loose ends. There were three children, by three different women, who lived within a few miles of each other but would only meet after his death. There was his dwindling practice, which he left $500,000 in debt. And, tucked away in his sketchbooks, was a complete set of drawings for an unrealised project one that would lie dormant in his archive for almost 40 years.
Some of these drawings will be on display in Britain for the first time next week, in a captivating retrospective of the architect's work at the Design Museum in London. The show unpicks the career of this late-flowering master, who only completed his first building in his 50s, but whose projects have proved to be some of the most influential of the 20th century. From the sun-baked Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, where a plaza open to the Pacific is framed by rows of study rooms, to the cosmic courtyards of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, his buildings have the power of ancient ruins, their massive, monolithic forms possessing a timeless, otherworldly air.
Continue reading...'It's a full-body experience'
Monty Python reunion exposes the moment actors dread
Welcome for wedding gate-crasher
Dust review human connection in the midst of apocalyptic doom
In Dust, a group of people are buried in the red dirt of the Pilbara, then forced to uncover truths about themselves
What we dig up comes back to haunt us, lap dancer Electra prophetically tells fly-in fly-out worker Ian in Black Swan Theatre Companys production of Dust.
Both Electra (Alison van Reeken) and Ian (Benj DAddario) are trapped in the Qantas lounge of Perth airport as the world outside turns blood red because of a dust storm. People are told by authorities to stay indoors amid fears the dust is toxic. It is the end of the world? A natural disaster? Or will it all blow over by morning?
Continue reading...Hedda Gabler review gender-bending restaging of Ibsen falls flat
Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney
The decision to cast a male actor in one of stage's most famous female parts fails to pay off, in this Australian reworking of a classic
Perhaps its the Simon Stone effect. The famed director formerly at Belvoir St Theatre and now one of Australias top theatrical exports has reinvented the way productions are staged in this country. In his wake, it seems almost every classic performed by a major theatre company is being rewritten and modernised with Australian accents, stripped back to its basics and spat out in a sparse yet shocking new treatment.
The conceit of this production of Henrik Ibsens 1890 play is that Hedda Gabler one of the most famous female parts on stage is played by a man. Ash Flanders, an actor and theatre maker who has made waves as one half of Melbourne queer duo Sisters Grimm, plays the title role. Its gender-bending stuff: Heddas not quite a woman, but not a man either.
Continue reading...The Good Person of Szechuan review: Brecht's bleak tale brought rudely to life
Malthouse theatre, Melbourne
An exceptional cast and a rough-edged production full of intriguing details make this Chinese/Australian take on Brecht refreshing, vulgar and vigorous
The gods come down to earth, wondering if there is, anywhere, a good person left. It turns out that in all of Szechuan, only Shen Te, the kindhearted sex worker, offers them shelter. Pleased they have found their good person, the gods give her a thousand silver dollars, and she opens a small tobacconist, planning to do good. But it seems doing good and surviving arent compatible in this poverty-stricken province.
The comedic pessimism of the Good Person of Szechuan, Bertolt Brechts 1945 fable about the brutalising nature of poverty, still remains ominously apt. The production at the Malthouse theatre summons a city that, as translator Tom Wright says, is not a real place, a nightmare city somewhere in the space between Melbourne, Beijing, Berlin and by extension Mosul, Donetsk, Aleppo, Kandahar, Santa Monica
Continue reading...Children In Need raised record £50m
Kimbra picks: ten of the best 90s tracks
90s Music by Kimbra is a kaleidoscopic, highly addictive homage to the decade in which she was born. We ask the Melbourne-based singer to pick her favourite 90s tracks
Continue reading...VIDEO: James Corden's star keeps rising
The White Widow: Searching for Samantha, BBC One, review: inside the terrorist myth
VIDEO: Easy Rider: Fonda talks Dennis Hopper
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