This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Martin McDonagh's "A Behanding in Spokane" (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead on "Alice in Wonderland" ("The Callie Crossley Show," WGBH, Boston)
Robert Christgau's March Consumer Guide (msn.com)
Robert Christgau on Lil Wayne (Barnes & Noble Review)
Christine Dolen talks with Lin-Manuel Miranda (The Miami Herald)
Matthew Gurewitsch considers orchestras' fixation on youth (The New York Times)
Matthew Gurewitsch on "Hamlet" and French grand opera (Pundicity/Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on Chris Mottalini and Paul Rudolph (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the overhaul of "How to Train Your Dragon" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Green Zone" and "A Prophet" (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on the National Book Critics Circle Award winners (The Associated Press)
Michael Kimmelman on Caravaggio's moment (The New York Times)
Tom Moon on Elis Regina (NPR)
Ann Powers on the indie bent of this season's "American Idol" (Los Angeles Times)
Kristin Tillotson on Lady Gaga (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Jerome Weeks on a "filmanthropy" project (KERA, Dallas)
Douglas Wolk reviews several new comic strip collections (The New York Times)

This is part of a series on people and organizations that make it possible for artists' work to be made and presented.

It was 9:30 at night when Robert Lyons ducked out of rehearsal at the Ohio Theatre, on Wooster Street in New York's Soho, to get some coffee. He's a big guy, 6 feet 4 inches tall, so walking unaccompanied to the deli should not have been a problem. But it was the late 1980s, and Soho then wasn't what Soho has become; for one thing, there were still delis to go to. There was no Barneys Co-Op on the next block, no Trump hotel-condominium sales office just up the cobblestoned street. There wasn't the pervasive sense of safety.

So when he returned a few minutes later with his coffee and saw four guys with broomsticks walking by, his impulse was to close the door to the Ohio and stand in front of it, as if he were protecting the theater. "And they just circled around me, and they wanted my money," Lyons recalled yesterday, sitting at a café table in the theater's lobby as the rain came down outside. "They all kind of hit me at the same time, and then somebody down the street yelled, and then they all ran, so they didn't even get my wallet. But my chin split open, and so blood was pouring down." At 50, he still has the scar.

My earlier post regarding arts news on the front page was, I believe, a bit misconstrued--I'm no purist when it comes to writing or reading about the arts (in fact, most of my own work on music during the past few years might reasonably be considered political stuff). Yet I'll not belabor the points I was trying to make back then.

I will however take note of arts news on the front page again (below the fold), in today's New York Times. It's a piece about the Lincoln Center Festival's presentation of "The Demons" this July. Since my wife is the fest's general manager (thus, I never actually write about the festival), this was much the dinner table talk at my home. And since this site's own John Rockwell was founding director of the festival (during a short hiatus from his long career at the Times), I figured the piece raised at least his eyebrows.

Patrick Healy's article is interesting not just for its placement, but for its approach to what is ostensibly an arts-marketing "hot ticket in town" story: Healy quotes at length folks who have purchased tickets (sort of like in those Broadway TV ads, only this time before the show has been seen, and with admittedly more substantive comments) and gets into the sticky business of box office politics (how many tickets go to institutional patrons and to press). I'm curious to know how all this struck our crowd.

While some of us are basking in an all-William-Kentridge-all-the-time moment, the matter of who and/or what killed Caravaggio demands our contemplation as well. Granted, this is a 400-year-old mystery, yet it made a strong bid for renewed attention this week, notably with Stacy Meichtry's terrific Wall Street Journal piece on Silvano Vinceti, the Italian TV host who's leading the charge to dig up as many graves as necessary in order to find the artist's ancient bones. (Footnote: "Mr. Vinceti recently announced plans to unearth Leonardo da Vinci. His goal: debunk claims that the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of the painter and, if possible, prove he was a vegetarian--a hunch Mr. Vinceti has had for years." So: Get your shovels ready for that.)

As Michael Day reports in The Independent, "researchers from the universities of Ravenna and Bologna have prepared DNA tests on the corpses in a Tuscan crypt that many believe contains [Caravaggio's] remains. They have already narrowed their investigation down to nine corpses, which have been sent to Ravenna for carbon-dating."

Reuters' Marie-Louise Gumuchian duly visits the Italian town of Caravaggio, where "a team of Italian anthropologists" went this week to conduct DNA "tests with possible descendents -- some of them carrying derivations of the family name. As Caravaggio died childless the team looked for the painter's closest blood descendents in search of a match."

Meanwhile, in The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman largely ignores the quest for the artist's remains in favor of discussing his work -- including the argument that "Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo."

"It's a two-hour version with no intermission, and it's very action-packed," said Mr. Burdman, who's directing the play. Audiences will be able to get in on the action to some extent by following the show as it moves around the center. "Wear comfortable shoes," Mr. Burdman said. "We've got seven flights of stairs." NYT 3/5/2010

This New York Times excerpt is from a story about a New York Classical Theater production of "Hamlet" directed by the company's artistic director Stephen Burdman. The show is in rehearsal for its opening in April at the World Financial Center, a sprawling space in Lower Manhattan. But the excerpt also tells us a little something about the increasing power of audience participation in live theater - in its process and performance. It's the age of the video games and reality TV, after all, and we want live theater to be engaging not only of our minds but of our bodies, too. We want to be stakeholders in the narrative. Theatergoers and even passersby who witness a sword fight between two Danes downtown should not be alarmed. It's just art. And on the night of the show, you can fully expect to use those comfortable shoes to "get in on the action."

Live theater is now a performance event for everyone!

In Cambridge, Mass., where I live, American Repertory Theater's artistic director Diane Paulus has put muscle into audience participation. Last year, she re-staged her crowd-inclusive "Donkey Show"; it's now running indefinitely in the theater's annex space where nearly nightly crowds turn out to dance alongside the "Midsummer Night's Dream"-cum-Studio 54 disco cast. One addict apparently has seen the show 30 times. (I've been three times.)

Ooh, I do like this (by David Cote in the Guardian online, as posted on Artsjournal):

We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters - call us what you will - are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.

Me, I have a somewhat more elevated image of the critic's role -- something to do with celebrating art in all its diversity, having a vision of what art really is (as opposed to what pedants claim it to be) and what it might become, helping others share my enthusiasms, and such. But lively writing is lively writing, and Cote wrote lively.

I am told that Time magazine used to call the paragraph conveying a story's news peg "the billboard graf," or sometimes the "why am I at this party" graf. So in this first posting, in the spirit of billboard grafs, I will follow Larry Blumenfeld's lead, and try to explain why I am here.

For a number of reasons, I've spent the last year immersed in education reporting, so it's nice to be back here thinking and talking about the arts. These two worlds intersect in critical ways, as today's kids are tomorrow's artists. I don't know about you, but my best school daze memories have nothing to do with the rote drills or the bubble tests. Chemistry? Feh. I only remember the teacher screaming at me when I picked up a pile of lye pellets because I thought they were pretty. But I do remember field trips to Lincoln Center, where we worked backstage with a director I would later interview. Physics is fuzzy, but I fondly recall finger painting in kindergarten and writing angst-ridden poetry in a class led by a teacher who didn't make fun of my adolescent musings.

I was reminded of this the other night during the Oscars when Michael Ciacchino won for his original score for "Up." He skipped the usual shout-outs to agents and higher powers and, instead, went right back to the beginning.

I was nine and I asked my dad, "Can I have your movie camera? That old, wind-up 8 millimeter camera that was in your drawer?" And he goes, "Sure, take it." And I took it and I started making movies with it and I started being as creative as I could, and never once in my life did my parents ever say, "What you're doing is a waste of time." Never. And I grew up, I had teachers, I had colleagues, I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you're doing is not a waste of time. So that was normal to me that it was OK to do that. I know there are kids out there that don't have that support system so if you're out there and you're listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It's not a waste of time. Do it. OK?

Not long ago, you were one of the most prolific freelance book critics in the United States. Now, after a stint as Granta's American editor, you've left New York for London, where you have the top spot on Granta's masthead. Being a freelance critic for (mostly) American newspapers and being the editor of a British literary magazine demand very different skill sets, maybe not so much intellectually as organizationally and socially. How have you made the transition?

That's right -- you could say the Americans and the English are divided by a common language. And not just the words. But I've quite enjoyed it. Granta's history has always been hybrid: an English literary magazine, resurrected by Americans, embraced by the English, and populated by writers from Ingo Schulze to Milan Kundera with of course generous contributions by the profoundly talented British and American novelists who have grown up with us. I think those moments of cultural friction are actually what give the magazine its distinct feel and texture. Managing that and making it into art, rather than something disjointed, is a much bigger challenge than figuring out when it's my turn to buy the round at a pub.

When a publication lays off a batch of key employees, the editor has to say something in an attempt to soothe the staffers who remain. Still, as reassurances go, "Today's changes won't be noticed by readers" is unlikely to pass muster. That's what editor Tim Gray told the survivors at troubled Variety yesterday after he laid off chief film critic Todd McCarthy, chief theater critic David Rooney, film critic Derek Elley and "features editor/indie film reporter Sharon Swart, along with several copy and design desk employees," according to TheWrap.

Even if the three critics take Gray up on his offer to let them continue as freelancers, there's no question that readers will notice the difference. Using what has become boilerplate language for media industry budget cutters, Gray told survivors in a memo, "Our goal is the same: To maintain, or improve, our quality coverage." A laudable ambition, but firing people is a thoroughly unrealistic way of attempting to reach it, as editors and publishers well know. What's remarkable is that, as long as they're dealing in fantasy, they don't come up with better talking points.

The issue is not solely one of skilled, experienced critics being cut loose -- though McCarthy, a 31-year veteran of Variety, speaks eloquently to that in an interview with Sharon Waxman. There's also the matter of what happens behind the scenes. Newspapers never have had fact-checkers as such, but good editors and copy editors serve that function, and they've saved many a writer's butt from inaccuracies, inadvertently libelous statements, and general sloppiness. Of course, it helps immensely when those editors know the writers, and therefore know what to look out for. With fewer editors, and freelancers rather than staff writers, the holes in the safety net get larger, and the publication suffers. That can get expensive. For a current case study from a related industry, see publishing's "The Last Train From Hiroshima" debacle.