Recently by Laura Collins-Hughes

The trope of the cold-blooded critic was strongly challenged this week when some New York reviewers, on Broadway no less, went out of their way not to inflict unnecessary harm on a pair of young artists who were out of their depth. Not wanting to inflict harm on theatergoers, either, however, they did their job and unanimously proclaimed the pair's musical, "Glory Days," the fiasco it evidently was -- "was" being the operative word for a show whose opening night proved also to be its closing night.

Former NAJP fellow Joshua Seftel, who's made a career as a documentarian, has brought a timely new comedy to the Tribeca Film Festival. "War, Inc.," co-written by and starring John Cusack, is screening all week, and S. James Snyder, a film critic for The New York Sun (where I work), is calling it one of the festival's not-to-be-missed events. Josh (NAJP 2002-03) is part of a Tribeca Talks panel discussion by directors and cinematographers tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the New School.

Amid the gloom that's permeated ARTicles of late, heartening news arrived this afternoon about a former NAJP fellow who's a genuine, working, staff critic at a major metro daily. The all-around excellent Ann Hornaday (NAJP 1994-95) was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, adding to the effervescence of a day when her paper, The Washington Post, walked away with a half-dozen Pulitzers. The five criticism jurors, among them former NAJP director Michael Janeway, lauded her "for her perceptive movie reviews and essays, reflecting solid research and an easy, engaging style."

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction released its long list today, with a familiar name right at the top. Former NAJP fellow Anita Amirrezvani (1998) is in the running for her first novel, "The Blood of Flowers," set in 17th-century Iran. The long list includes writers eligible for the £30,000 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the £10,000 Orange Broadband Award for New Writers, or both.

In Sunday's New York Times, the always fun to parse Corrections section has an editor's note that's arresting in its opacity, given the glaring conflict of interest it acknowledges, as well as the carelessness that seems to have led to the piece in question making its way into the Times' pages:

A question-and-answer interview on March 2 in Arts & Leisure with the director and a cast member of the Classic Stage Company's production of "The Seagull" was conducted by Rosemarie Tichler, a freelance writer who is on the board of directors of Classic Stage. She disclosed this fact in a note to the assigning editor, but it was overlooked in the editing process. Had The Times noticed her affiliation, it would have sought another interviewer for the article.

When it comes to the big journalism scandals -- plagiarism, fabrication, that sort of thing -- the arts desk tends to be left out of the action: unscathed, perhaps, but also sidelined, a mere spectator to the drama.

Neatly handwritten in bold, black marker on a subway poster for the upcoming movie, "Semi-Pro":

WILL FERRELL. IN THE SAME ROLE YOU'VE SEEN 10 TIMES BEFORE. NOT FUNNY ANYMORE. SERIOUSLY.

The Guardian, home to some of the smartest and most entertaining arts blogs on the Web, has a thought-provoking piece by Andrew Haydon, who takes the British tabs to task for giggling and snorting like a pack of schoolchildren every time an actor does a nude role onstage. He's right, of course, that their behavior is juvenile; he's also right to censure theater PR people for encouraging and colluding in the idiocy.

Where Haydon goes wrong is in dragging Douglas Carter Beane's play, "The Little Dog Laughed," into the argument. " Already in the US this year," he writes, "column inches have been frittered away noting the trivial matter of a playwright objecting to some nudity that he wrote into a play being ignored by its current director."

 But there's nothing trivial about Beane's objection, and it's a legitimate story. As Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones reported on his blog, Beane took issue with About Face Theatre, a gay and lesbian company in Chicago, for leaving out the nudity that is unambiguously written into his script. (The crucial stage direction: "When they are both naked, Mitchell kneels before Alex, the door opens, Diane walks in.") According to Playbill's Kenneth Jones, Beane had refused a pre-opening request to cut the nudity and threatened to shut ...

I'm the deputy cultural editor of The New York Sun. My first foray into arts journalism occurred in the early 1990son Cape Cod, where Ispent three years writing theater criticism, among other things. I was passionate about arts journalism, but I was nonetheless briefly lured back to the news side until thechilly June afternoon when I did a one-off arts interview as a favor for an editor friend. Listening to Jose Quintero talk about Eugene O'Neill -- Mr. Quintero's cancer-ravaged voice amplified by a handheld machine, the fog shrouding Provincetown Harbor behind him -- convinced methat I needed to find my way back to doing cultural coverage, and so I did.

At various times since then, I have been the arts editor of the New Haven Register;a freelance writer for American Theatre, The New York Times, Newsday, Nextbook, and other publications; and a contributing news editor for ArtsJournal.com. I'm a member of the National Arts Journalism Program board, and I was a 2005 NAJP fellow at Columbia University.