Morning, folks!
What do expensive arts centers and the city’s non-landowning working class have in common? Both are increasingly relocating outside the District limits! (The difference being the former are doing so by choice.) WaPo’s Anne Midgette explains how the area’s newest performing-arts facilities are being built in the ’burbs (Arena Stage notwithstanding), and what that tells us about the bridge-and-tunnel crowd:
As the gravitational pull of traditional forms of performing arts grows weaker, meaning that people are less eager to travel a distance to spend a few hundred dollars to see a concert or play, regional centers may be the wave of the future… Today, the arts have to come to the audience rather than the other way round.
Also in WaPo: Somebody at E! didn’t get the memo about D.C. being a disastrous place to set a reality T.V. show. And apparently that somebody is Rob Lowe. (BTW, this new one reportedly co-stars former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, begging the question: is an impromptu cat fight with turncoat former colleague Matthew Scully in the cards?)
ATTACK OF THE SURTITLES!!!!! Freed explains in dramatic terms why Theater J’s upcoming production of Return to Haifa won’t be performed in English.
As nautical-themed parody rap goes, they’re no Lonely Island Boys. So why are Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly cutting a hip-hop album? And why is Mos Def (allegedly) producing it?
Also, why do ironic white rappers always seem to rhyme only in couplets?