San Diego Opera’s most recent production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is an example of how opera companies hope to attract younger audiences while coping with rising costs and smaller budgets. The pandemic hasn’t been kind to the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts has reported that stage performances joined oil drilling/exploration and air transportation “as the steepest-declining areas of the U.S. economy in 2020.” And opera, which had already been experiencing shrinking audiences, was the hardest hit of all the arts. Smaller companies are struggling to stay in business. Even New York’s Metropolitan Opera had to dip into its reserves this season for $40 Million.
Show People (1928) to Quentin Tarantino’s elegiac
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) films about Hollywood, and by extension Los Angeles, have been there from the start of movies and continued in various guises throughout its multifarious history, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Throughout the sixties and early seventies several films were produced that spoke of the end of Hollywood as a creative enterprise, that is, as a field in which artists could examine their emotions and ideas and their response to the contemporary world – a civilization in crisis that they sought to describe or explore in depth from within. From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s