Natalie Portman Responds to Rose McGowan’s Oscars Dress Criticism

Variety: Natalie Portman has responded to Rose McGowan’s social media critique of her red carpet protest at the Oscars. The “Black Swan” star created a stir with her decision to wear a black and gold Dior dress that included a cape embroidered with the names of snubbed female directors.

How to take fast impulse response measurements in Smaart© without pissing people off

www.sounddesignlive.com: Measuring room modes sucks. It takes too long, pisses people off, and the ROI is debatable.

Craig Noel Awards honor 'Almost Famous,' 'Cambodian Rock Band' and other local theater highlights

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Theaters large and small from around San Diego County shared in the
honors Monday night as the 18th annual Craig Noel Awards celebrated the
best in local theater for 2019.

The awards — presented by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle and named in honor of the Old Globe’s late founding director (a key force in San Diego theater) — were spread out among 10 companies.

Rose McGowan Calls Natalie Portman’s Oscars Cape ‘Deeply Offensive’

Variety: Rose McGowan called Natalie Portman a “fraud” for her Oscars ensemble that featured the names of snubbed female directors, including Greta Gerwig, Marielle Heller and Lorene Scafaria.

Stellar Performances Abound in Split Stage's "Next to Normal"

Pittsburgh in the Round: Selling audiences on a musical that delves into the excruciating morass a woman traverses as she faces grief, mental illness, a stymied marriage, and a romance, of sort, with a pharmacologist seems like a pretty daunting, if not impossible, feat. Veering catastrophically into the territory of tacky or egregiously offensive seems likely—being infinitely heart-wrenching and winning a Pulitzer Prize seems vastly less likely.

3 traits you need to make stress work for you

www.fastcompany.com: We all know that person who is constantly stressed out where everything is an ordeal. And then there’s the person who seems to go with the flow, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Sometimes these two people experience the exact same event and react in completely different ways. Why?

ADAPT Leadership Awards Will Honor Ali Stroker, LaChanze, and More

www.broadwayworld.com: The 2020 ADAPT Leadership Award honorees have been announced, including Ali Stroker, LaChanze, and more!

The 2020 ADAPT Leadership Awards Gala will take place on Thursday, March 12th, at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City.

The awards honor the accomplishments of extraordinary individuals and corporations who have made an impact on people with disabilities and have inspired others through their professional and charitable endeavors.

It's About Time: Growing As An Audio Professional While Keeping An Eye On The Work/Life Balance

ProSoundWeb: In case your Apple watch is on the fritz, I’d like to offer a friendly reminder that there are only 24 hours in a day. What we do with those hours is often dictated by our current occupation in professional audio, but sometimes the choice is actually our own. You may be an audio engineer on tour or employed at a venue, or perhaps your role in the industry keeps you closer to home working at an office that services audio clients. Either way, if you’re lucky, you’ll occasionally get a few hours or even a few days off.

NAMM 2020 Highlights

LightSoundJournal.com: The 2020 edition of Anaheim’s NAMM Show has just closed its doors and there is no doubt that, for another consecutive year, the fair has shown a marked growth on all fronts.
Speaking of musical instruments, the gap between exhibitors and the public compared to European fairs is very large. This is a gap that reflects the real situation of the MI market, which is lively and flourishing in America, yet weak and uninspiring in Europe.

Moving Towards a Migratory Dramaturgy

HowlRound Theatre Commons: Before I called myself a theatremaker or even an artist, I knew I was Indian and American, somewhere in the middle. “Immigrant” was one of my first identities.

Given my own migrations—and the contemporary focus on international border-crossing—I have long been interested in advocacy and relief for individuals displaced from their homes in search of safety. Recently, I have focused on the ways we—international migrants—perform our identities, cultures, and histories in new environments. Now, as a theatremaker and artist, I create performances with asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants about their lives, often in their new homes.

VR-adaptations: Faithfulness and Interactions

The Theatre Times: Mika Johnson is an artist with a background in theatre, but also a film director. Besides this, he makes music and works as a photographer. He is the director of VRwandlung, a production that is based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The production toured around the world, but recently it was presented also at Hungary’s first VR-focused event, Vektor VR section in the frame of 16th Verzió Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest. On this occasion, we asked him about how he became a VR creator, about the challenges of adaptations, and the special mindset that VR might require.

‘Too Heavy For Your Pocket’ tells the story of the Freedom Riders

New Pittsburgh Courier: New Horizon Theater newcomers Brenden Peifer and Hope Anthony are ready to sink their teeth into the meaty, yet relatable roles of Tony Carter and Evelyn Brandon in the production, “Too Heavy For Your Pocket.”

Visual Effects Society Angry That Cats Ruined the Oscars

Consequence of Sound: Cats didn’t just ruin its own visual effects; it ruined the art form for the people who actually make visual effects. After a gag about Cats introduced the Oscars’ Outstanding Visual Effects category, the Visual Effects Society is angry that such a catastrophic failure of CGI was tapped to represent them on the industry’s biggest night.

Absen announces lightest rental staging LED series

www.avinteractive.com: Absen has announced the launch of a new super-lightweight touring solution for rental stagers on the opening day of ISE 2020. The Venus (VN) Series is an innovative LED display that has been specifically designed for concerts and festivals due to its ability to create supersized screens at speed.

ScareHouse returns with Valentine’s Day debut of two new attractions and reopening of 'The Basement'

Features | Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh City Paper: Months have passed since local horror attraction ScareHouse had to postpone, and ultimately cancel, its Strip District-based Halloween happening called the Scream District. Now, ScareHouse has returned to the Strip District to terrorize Valentine’s Day with three new attractions.

Despite No Female Directors, Women Still Won Big At The 2020 Oscars

www.forbes.com: A lack of diversity was once again the story when the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced. No female directors were nominated, and in fact many female directed films were left out of the awards altogether (The Farewell, Hustlers, Honey Boy, etc.), in addition to rather a lack of people of color. Knowing that, I settled in on Sunday for a long night of what I assumed would be the presentation of many awards to a long line of white men.

Angela Hewitt's rare Fazioli piano dropped by movers

CNN: An extremely rare, $194,000 grand piano was smashed when movers dropped it while taking it out of a recording studio, Canadian virtuoso Angela Hewitt has revealed.
Hewitt, one of the world's leading classical pianists, said in a Facebook post that she had just finished recording Beethoven's piano variations in Berlin when the movers entered the studio control room to tell her they had dropped her handmade Fazioli piano.

2nd Circuit Appeals Court Upholds Drake Sampling Fair Use Victory, But Doesn't Think It's Useful For Anyone Else

Techdirt: Two and a half years ago, we wrote about a nice fair use victory for Drake with regards to a track that he had sampled. As we noted in that post, it is stunning how bad courts have been in determining whether or not sampled music is fair use -- with a couple of famously preposterous rulings on the book, including one where the judge seemed more focused on giving biblical justifications for his rulings, rather than Constitutional ones. Still, in the age of Blurred Lines-like decisions, and the influx of similar lawsuits over mere inspiration, it seemed unlikely that we'd ever get a clean ruling on whether or not certain types of sampling -- such as those that use tiny bits or that alter the sample significantly -- were fair use. Yet here we are.

Netflix has removed nine titles from its service to comply with government requests

The Verge: Since Netflix was founded almost 25 years ago, the company has removed nine titles from its service around the world in compliance with government demands, including Night of the Living Dead in Germany and Full Metal Jacket in Vietnam.

Multiply Your Specials With The Rosco I-Cue™

Rosco Spectrum: Dogfight is an enormous musical. We were constantly jumping around from location to location and sometimes right into musical numbers where we were nowhere specific at all. From the beginning of my design process, I knew that I needed to be able to specifically isolate characters in order to make them really pop out, both for the book scenes as well as within the large musical numbers.