NOTHING A SOLD-OUT TOUR WON’T HELP

The Bolshoi Ballet started their first U.S. tour since the collapse of the Soviet Union with a three-hour “Romeo and Juliet” at Washington’s Kennedy Center. The 224-year-old Bolshoi has recently been recovering from an ousted artistic director and serious financial woes – that a sell-out U.S. tour should help ease. – CNN

THE MP3 OF MOVIES?

DivX video compression technology is supposed to  turn the web into a big video library, doing for video what MP3 has done for music. “I just wanted, longed in fact, to spend half a day – which is what the DivX savvy told me to expect from my T1 line – waiting for a movie to amble onto my computer. It apparently takes anywhere from two to 10 hours to download a DivX version of a film, but I was ready.” With all the hassles and complications, though, as it stands now DivX “remains a technology with a lot of theoretical potential and some very practical failures. Great it may become; MP3 it is not.” – Salon 05/31/00

BROADWAY BOOM

The numbers are in for the 1999-2000 Broadway season, which officially closed Sunday: Box-office sales hit an all-time New York high of $603 million, with 11.4 million theatergoers – the second-highest attendance on record. – Backstage

CEMETERY PLOT FAKES OUT MEDIA

The latest in everlasting bliss: the Final Curtain cemetery theme park, where you can have a dance floor installed over your gravesite, or a video camera in your coffin to show time-lapse display of your corporeal decay. Too strange to be true?  Not to 39 newspapers, 19 radio stations, six TV stations, 10 magazines and 20 Web sites who fell for the story. Performance artist and media scammer Joey Skaggs strikes again. – Salon

TUNE SEARCH

In the vast Edenic garden of downloadable music, one ought to be able to navigate with ease, download in a facile manner, and always have the latest information on favorite artists – unfortunately, it’s easy to get lost in the e-quagmire. Now, three new search engines promise to help you find and keep the tunes you love. – Wired

FULL OF HEART

Conductor Mariss Jansons almost died of a heart attack at the podium during a “La Bohème” in Oslo four years ago. Now at the helm of both the Oslo Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony, his career has hit an updraft – Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal recently launched an exclusively Jansons subscription series. – The Telegraph (UK)