Here are a couple of stories from Dutch news from last month…

The Hermitage’s Amsterdam location is now home to thirty Golden Age paintings by Rembrandt et al., similar to his masterpiece The Night Watch, which lives at the Rijksmuseum across town. I didn’t make it to this Hermitage last time (misread the closing time), so now there’s even more reason to put it on the list.

Here’s a story about Imagine Nation, a new theater group in the Netherlands. I don’t particularly care where their funding is coming from, and I’m not a big fan of musicals, but I’m intrigued by the sound of the production being described, not only because of the unusual venue, but also because of the powerful story it tells. [There’s a 1977 Dutch movie, Soldier of Orange, that tells the WWII story of a group of Dutch students caught up in the Nazi occupation and how their lives and sympathies unfold. Rutger Hauer played one of the lead characters. Described as a war film, it is also a phenomenal anti-war film. Catch it on Netflix – hopefully they stock the Dutch-language version; the dubbed version is nowhere near as good].