G4 TV Shuts Down Two Years After Comcast Tried to Revive Gaming Network

G4 is shutting down — again. Comcast Spectacor, the cable and entertainment giant’s sports and esports division, told G4 TV employees Sunday that the gaming network was shutting down effective immediately. The decision has resulted in 45 staff members of G4 TV losing their jobs. In a memo, obtained by Variety, Comcast Spectacor chairman and CEO Dave Scott cited low viewership and said the network had not achieved “sustainable financial results.” “Over the past several months, we worked hard to generate that interest in G4, but viewership is low and the network has not achieved sustainable financial results,” Scott wrote. “This is certainly not what we hoped for, and, as a result, we have made the very difficult decision to discontinue G4’s operations, effective immediately.” Comcast Spectacor in July 2020 said it would reboot G4 TV, which NBCUniversal shut down in 2013 (after the network first launched in 2002). Russell Arons, the former Warner Bros., Machinima, EA and Mattel exec who joined G4 as president in September 2021, left the company two months ago. The content studio and network officially returned to linear television on Nov. 16, 2021, after more than a year of the group releasing content online to test show new concepts. At launch, G4 TV was available Comcast’s Xfinity TV, Verizon Fios, Cox Communications and internet streaming service Philo. The network’s programming slate brought back fan-favorite legacy G4 shows like “Attack of the Show!” and “Xplay.” In addition to Arons, Comcast Spectacor had hired two G4 alums: Brian Terwilliger, most recently at WWE and former producer for G4’s “Attack of the Show!”, joined as VP of programming and creative strategy. Blair Herter, who once worked on both “X-Play” and “Attack of the Show!”, had come on board as Comcast Spectacor’s VP of content partnerships and brand development. G4 had established its own broadcast studio in Burbank, Calif., outfitted for professional esports gameplay. The roster of talent for the short-lived network include returning G4 hosts Kevin Pereira and Adam Sessler; esports personalities Alex “Goldenboy” Mendez (host of NBC’s “The Titan Games”), Ovilee May and Froskurinn; WWE Superstar Xavier Woods (aka Austin Creed); YouTube personalities Kassem G, Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil and Gina Darling; Twitch streamers Fiona Nova and Will Neff; livestreamer CodeMiko; and a “degenerate rat-puppet” named Ratty. G4’s shutdown was first reported by Deadline. Read Scott’s Sunday email to G4 staffers: October 16, 2022 Team: As you know, G4 was re-introduced last year to tap into the popularity of gaming. We invested to create the new G4 as an online and TV destination for fans to be entertained, be inspired, and connect with gaming content. Over the past several months, we worked hard to generate that interest in G4, but viewership is low and the network has not achieved sustainable financial results. This is certainly not what we hoped for, and, as a result, we have made the very difficult decision to discontinue G4’s operations, effective immediately. I know this is disappointing news, and I’m disappointed, too. I want to thank you and everyone on the G4 team for the hard work and commitment to the network. Our human resources team is reaching out to you to provide you with support, discuss other opportunities that may be available, and answer any questions you may have. Thank you again for all of your hard work for G4. Sincerely, Dave Scott Chairman and CEO Comcast Spectacor Source link Originally published at Melbourne News Vine

Hi! Would you happen to have any quotes on the concept of home (whether a physical place, feeling, person, etc.)?

"But your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways."

⁠— Rainer Maria Rilke, from ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, tr. M. D. Herter Norton

"I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.”

— Charlotte Brontë, from 'Jane Eyre'

“..she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road.”

— Shirley Jackson, from 'The Haunting of Hill House'

“...I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest⁠—rest⁠—live in, emotionally speaking."

— Tennessee Williams, from 'The Night of the Iguana'

"Stephen Burt in the London Review of Books wrote of you: 'She seems at home nowhere, not in her own head, or in our time, or in the ancient world.' Is this true?"

"I feel perfectly at home underwater."

— Anne Carson

"Really bad: being invited out / when home has quieter spaces, / better coffee, / and there's no need for conversation."

— Gottfried Benn, Selected Poems and Prose; from ‘What’s bad’, tr. David Paisey

"I hand you my universe and you live me / It is you whom I love today. / = I love you with all my loves / I'll give you the forest with a little house in it with all the good things there are in my construction, you'll live joyfully - I want you to live joyfully."

— Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo, tr. Barbara Crow de Toledo & Ricardo Pohlenz

"You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want."

— André Aciman, from 'Call Me By Your Name'

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?'

"I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation.

Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am.

Are you following me?"

— Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings; 'I Have Decided'

"I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe."

— Maya Angelou, from 'Letters To My Daughter'

"And though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration."

— Charles Dickens, from 'Martin Chuzzlewit’

"Home is where my habits have a habitat."

— Fiona Apple, from 'Better Version of Me'

"Home, I said. / In every language there is a word for it. / In the body itself, climbing / those walls of white thunder, past those green / temples, there is also / a word for it. / I said, home."

— Mary Oliver, Dream Work; from 'The River'

"Where Thou art — that — is Home —"

— Emily Dickinson, from 'The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson’

by Jenny Hansell

The Taming of the Shrew probably can’t be tamed. Do it with an all-female cast, or all male; change the setting and period; rewrite some key lines to try to minimize the sting, make it more modern, more palatable. No matter what you do, it’s still a play about a man who humiliates, starves, gaslights, beats, and maybe even rapes a woman, who ultimately submits and tells other women to do the same.  Yet theater artists are still drawn to the play for its complexity and wit, and for what it has to say about our present day, when a “nasty woman” or one who persists, are likely to be labeled shrewish, or dismissed, or tamed.

  So might as well grapple with it head-on, as does Shakespeare & Company’s lively new production, now playing at The Dell at The Mount in Lenox.  A talented group of mostly very young actors has been touring this production to school groups for the last five months, and they introduced the play with a pre-show talkback describing some of the reactions they get from students, including anger and even betrayal: one student asked  “what did you just make us laugh at?”

  The show as presented at The Mount is an expanded version of the school production: the cast, dressed in 80’s style pop-art colors, invites audience participation, including to say “ooooh,” whenever Vincentio is mentioned, presumably to highlight the importance that wealth and money play in Padua. That’s where Kate and her sister Bianca are meant to be married off to rich men, who themselves hope to find women with large dowries along with beauty and docility.

  Kate, of course, is not docile, and the plot revolves around her suitor, Petruchio’s, attempts to tame her.  In Kirsten Peacock’s superb performance, Kate never really submits: she is an equal in every way, who finds in Petruchio (Nick Nudler, with a studly surfer vibe) an equal, someone with whom she can join in the game. At the end, the two of them seem to be in cahoots, fooling the others into thinking Kate has submitted.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The script has been trimmed to a lean and effective 90 minutes. The colorful sets, lively costumes, late 80s soundtrack (Madonna, a-ha and Billy Idol), and staging, with the actors racing through the audience and across the lovely grounds at the Mount, work well together – there is never a sense of trying too hard.

  As Bianca, Bella Pelz hilariously plays up her status as Kate’s victim, wringing sympathy and favoritism out of her father. Other standouts in the excellent cast are Devante Owens, as Lucentio, Bianca’s suitor, and Dara Brown as Tranio, who (for some reason) disguises herself as Lucentio to woo Bianca on his behalf. Why does the play have both a Grumio and a Gremio? Don’t worry about it: Caitlin Kraft and Jordan Mann, and the rest of the cast, breath life into the 400 year old blank verse.

  In the talk-back after the show, Nudler responded to a question about how he played Petruchio, saying he felt the way Petruchio treats Kate was what he (the character) had been taught, until he learned to treat her like an equal, and that as an actor he appreciated being supported in making the “ugly choice.”  The production’s willingness to show the ugliness and provoke discomfort, anxiety and even anger, and then show the growth of these individual characters without violating the integrity of Shakespeare’s text, is impressive as well as highly entertaining. Well done.

  The Taming of The Shrew by William Shakespeare, directed by Kelly Galvin, runs July 9 – August 17 at The Dell at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home. Artistic Director: Allyn Burrows; Managing Director: Adam Davis; Set Designer: Devon Drohan; Costume Designer: Amie Jay; Vocal Coach: Gwendolyn Schwinke; Movement Director: Ryan Winkles; Stage Manager: Cindy Wade.

Cast: Ensemble: Zoa Archer, Cedar Potter, Fiona Herter; Tranio: Dara Brown;  Grumio/Widow: Caitlin Kraft; Hortensio/Vincentio: Daniel Light; Bapista: Matthew Macca; Gremio/Curtis: Jordan Mann; Petruchio: Nick Nudler; Lucentio: Devante Owens; Kate: Kirsten Peacock; Bianca: Bella Pelz.

Tickets for The Taming of the Shrew are available online at shakespeare.org or by calling Shakespeare & Company’s box office at (413) 637-3353 and is generously sponsored by Howard and Natalie Shawn. The Mount is located at 2 Plunkett Street in Lenox, Massachusetts. The grounds open 90 minutes before each performance. Audience members are encouraged to bring chairs or blankets and a picnic; chairs are also available to rent for a fee of $2 per chair.

REVIEW: “The Taming of the Shrew” at Shakespeare & Company by Jenny Hansell The Taming of the Shrew probably can’t be tamed. Do it with an all-female cast, or all male; change the setting and period; rewrite some key lines to try to minimize the sting, make it more modern, more palatable.

Imagine sitting in a beautiful, verdant shaded dell on a perfect Berkshire summer’s evening. Even though busy Route 7 is in walking distance of where you are sitting, any sound of the traffic is muffled by the majestic old growth trees surrounding you. At the base of the gentle slope before you sits a tiny patch of a wooden stage, on to which a troupe of remarkably talented young actors bursts forth with tremendous energy to present a rollicking two hours of Shakespeare.

This happens every summer at The Dell at The Mount, located just behind the mansion’s Stables adjacent to the parking area, where Shakespeare & Company stages an abbreviated version of one of the Bard’s plays. In past years the shows have had strong name recognition – Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet – but this year the company has gone out on a limb and is presenting Love’s Labors Lost, an obscure early entry into the Bard’s canon that is seldom produced and little known to the general public.

But I implore you not to let the obscurity of the title put you off. Director Kelly Galvin’s condensation of the script trims off much that would be confounding to modern audiences and highlighted both the romance and the clowning at the core of the play. Her actors use the entire landscape of The Dell, rushing up and down hills, hiking through the forest, and creating merry mayhem wherever they go.

Quick plot summary: The King of Navarre (Rylan Morsbach) and his courtiers – Berowne (David Bertoldi), Longaville (Madeleine Maggio), and Dumaine (Devante Owens) – sign a pact to spend the next three years devoting themselves to study, foreswearing all entertainments, including the company of women. So of course, before the ink is dry, the Princess of France (Rory Hammond) and three lovely attendants – Rosaline (Caroline Calkins), Katharine (Dara Silverman), and Maria (Emily Eldridge-Ingram) – show up. Despite forcing them to camp outside the castle wall, each gentleman quickly finds himself smitten with one of the ladies, and hilarity ensues as they first attempt to woo without letting their companions discover their weakness, and then come to the ladies in disguise as Muscovites (ie Russians from Moscow) in an attempt to assure that their affections are returned.

In a subplot the lowly Costard (Luke Haskell) and the hifalutin’ Don Adriano de Armado (Thomas Reynolds) vie for the affections of country bumpkin Jacquenetta (also Madeleine Maggio). Costard is then paid by various suitors to deliver love letters and, being unable to read, manages to get many missives in the wrong hands.

The show is opened by the loquacious and orotund scholar, Holofernes (Lori Evans), and the plain-spoken Moth (Bella Pelz). Eldridge-Ingram doubles as the aptly named Officer Dull; Caitlin Kraft plays the Princess’s efficient secretary Boyet; Fiona Herter is the Forester who leads the ladies on a successful afternoon of bow hunting; and Cindy Wade is Marcade.

As the play draws to its conclusion, Holofernes organizes a dreadful pageant of The Nine Worthies to entertain the court, which devolves into a ridiculous free-for-all interrupted by a shocking announcement. I will not spoil the surprise and let you see for yourself how it all ends.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If it is not plain from this description, this is a very funny 90+ minutes of theatre. I am still laughing at the Muscovites – definitely worth the comedic price of admission – and smiling at playful the battle of the sexes, which the ladies win hands down.

The cast is uniformly excellent and each give charming and distinctive performances, while playing superbly as an ensemble. They really do function both as outstanding individual performers and a cohesive whole and singling them out for praise felt like picking the individual chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie – the chips are yummy, but the whole cookie is so much more delicious. They just genuinely seem to be having fun out there, and fun is always contagious!

There are many challenges to performing out of doors – sudden downpours, extreme temperatures, inhaling insects during crucial lines – but none is greater for the actor than making themselves heard. There is nothing to bounce the voice off of, it just leaves your mouth and goes sailing out into the environment where it is quickly absorbed by soil, foliage, and the audience’s clothing. Voice expert Kristin Linklater was a founding member of Shakespeare & Company, and her vocal techniques form a core of their actor training. Linklater trained Gwendolyn Schwinke is the vocal coach for this production, and she and Galvin have assisted the young actors in making themselves clearly heard throughout The Dell. Because I am in a wheelchair which is difficult to maneuver over grass, I park myself high up on the hillside, close to the roadway that runs behind The Stables and I could hear every word.

Costume designer Elizabeth Magas has done an excellent job of crafting colorful and whimsical outfits that distinguish the characters at a glance, important outdoors where actors are viewed from a greater distance than usual, and helpful when roles are doubled. Apparently, it is the early 1960’s in France because the Princess and her cohort have Donna Reed frocks for daywear and Mary Tyler Moore capri pants for their hunting expedition.

Deborah Morris has provided a subtle and evocative score. I always enjoy hearing the music wafting through The Dell at these outdoor performances, and this year was no exception.

The small set on the stage area is agreeably designed by Devon Drohan in a rustic and romantic theme. The lighting is provided by Mother Nature. The Dell is nice and shady for the 6 pm performances, but sun block and wide brimmed hats are recommended for the 11 am shows on Saturdays. The evening I attended was relatively bug-free, but insect repellent is always a prudent precaution.

Tickets are reasonably priced at $25 for adults and $10 for youth, and a day trip to Lenox to see The Mount, catch a concert at Tanglewood, do some shopping, and dine at one of the eclectic eateries is always a treat. I highly recommend Love’s Labors Lost for a family outing this summer!

Love’s Labors Lost by William Shakespeare, directed by Kelly Galvin, runs from July 10-August 18, 2018, outdoors in The Dell at The Mount, 2 Plunkett Street in Lenox MA. Vocal coach Gwendolyn Schwinke, set design by Devon Drohan, costume design by Elizabeth Magas, original score by Deborah Morris, stage management by Cindy Wade. CAST: Bella Pelz as Moth, Caitlin Kraft as Boyet, Caroline Calkins as Rosaline, Dara Silverman as Katharine and Sir Nathaniel, Devid Bertoldi as Berowne, Devante Owens as Dumaine, Emily Eldridge-Ingram, Fiona Herter as the Forester, Lori Evans as Holofernes, Luke Haskell as Costard, Madeleine Maggio as Longaville and Jacquenetta, Rory Hammond as the Princess of France, Rylan Morsebach as the King of Navarre, Thomas Reynolds and Don Armado, and Cindy Wade as Marcade.

Tickets for Love’s Labor’s Lost are available online at shakespeare.org, or by calling Shakespeare & Company’s box office at (413) 637-3353. The show is family-friendly, general admission, and tickets are $25 for adults and $10 for youth. Performances will run approximately 90 minutes with no intermission, and will be followed by short talk-back with the actors. The Mount is located at 2 Plunkett Street in Lenox, Massachusetts. The grounds open 90 minutes before each performance. Audience members are encouraged to bring chairs or blankets and a picnic; chairs are also available to rent for a fee of $2 per chair.

Rain Policy:

From time to time weather may affect your enjoyment of the performance in the outdoor at the Mount or the Roman Garden Theatre. Most often the show will go on and depending on the severity of the rain, will be performed as scheduled. Performances at the Mount may be held for 20 minutes to see if the rain will let up. If the weather may cause a safety risk for you, the performers, and the staff, the performance will be cancelled.

If a performance is cancelled for any reason, please contact the Box Office within 48 hours of the cancelled performance and choose one of the options listed below.

EXCHANGE– Exchange your ticket for any of our other schedule performances. The Exchange fee will be waived.

DONATE – Show your support for the great work across all of our stages and donate the value of the tickets back to the Festival.

Imagine sitting in a beautiful, verdant shaded dell on a perfect Berkshire summer’s evening. Even though busy Route 7 is in walking distance of where you are sitting, any sound of the traffic is muffled by the majestic old growth trees surrounding you.

Shakespeare & Company Presents "Love's Labor's Lost"

Shakespeare & Company Presents “Love’s Labor’s Lost”

(Lenox, MA) – Shakespeare & Company presents William Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labor’s Lost, directed by Kelly Galvin and performed outside in The Dell at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home. This family-friendly, open-air production featuring Shakespeare & Company Education Artists runs from July 10th – August 18th.

“One of Shakespeare’s very first plays, Love’s Labor’s Lost offers us a glimpse of…

View On WordPress