Month: December 2003

An Authentic Shakespeare Audience, in Manhattan

This week, Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV played to a packed house – of public high school students. Student audiences are rarely a performer’s dream, but this one was apparently quite different. “Certainly they were not the usual Wednesday matinee crowd. They hooted, cheered, hissed and roared with laughter. They were probably closer to an Elizabethan audience at the Globe than anything the actors at the Vivian Beaumont Theater had ever faced. It was, in the language of the theater, a great house.”

NY Phil Musicians Rallying Behind Maazel

When Loren Maazel was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2001, the press groaned openly that the 70-year-old conductor was too boring, didn’t fit the Phil’s sound well, and would surely be only a stopgap director, given his advanced age. But at a board meeting this week, several Philharmonic musicians were invited to make a presentation, during which they rallied behind Maazel, calling him “brilliant,” and asking that the board not rush to replace him when his contract expires in 2006. The musicians clearly enjoy working with Maazel, but their support also appears to have much to do with the dearth of potential candidates to replace him at the moment.

Clamping A Lid On Iraqi Orchestra Musicians

The Wall Street Journal sends a reporter to meet with members of the Iraqi National Symphony during their visit to Washington DC. A small, but significant problem, though: how to get through the layers of officials to actually meet with any musicians? After a month of futile trying, Ayad Rahim finally gets a few minutes with three musicians, but nothing substantive. So much for “cultural exchange.”

Nutcracker Nation

Jennifer Fisher’s new history of the Nutcracker demonstrates that the piece is no “monolithic artifact. Since its first production, which was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1892 for the Mariinsky Theater (now home to the Kirov Ballet and Opera), it has become a theme to be riffed upon as much as a masterpiece to be preserved. Fisher believes that when it ” immigrated ” to this side of the Atlantic in the 20th century, it began a versatile career as a conduit for psychological, artistic, ethnic, and community aspirations as diverse as North America itself.”

The Shaw Festival’s Disastrous Season At The Box Office

Ontario’s Shaw Festival saw revenues and attendance plunge this season. “Total attendance at the Niagara-on-the-Lake theatre festival in 2003 was 269,407, compared with 315,477 in 2002 and 331,001 in 2001. Revenues from theatre operations slumped to $13.2 million, compared with $16.9 million in 2002. No one was available last night to comment on how deeply the festival will be in the red. One previous estimate in the Star put the total at about $2 million.”

Page: Remaking The Scottish Ballet

When Ashley Page was asked to take over the Scottish Ballet, his demands were uncompromising: “His bottom line was that he had no interest in running a cut-price Kirov or Royal Ballet. He envisioned Scottish Ballet as a small, flexible ensemble capable of performing modern dance and contemporary classical works. He wanted to be able to stage the neoclassical masterworks of Balanchine at one extreme and the austerely postmodernist choreo-graphy of Trisha Brown at the other. To drive this vision, however, Page insisted he would need a larger budget and “a major clearout of the existing dancers”.

In Defence Of BBC4 Culture

BBC4 is where most of the BBC’s cultural program now ends up. It is a popular target of critics from all sides. “It does not like to describe itself as highbrow – ‘We always try and avoid that word,’ says a BBC press officer – but it is pitched squarely at the class Keynes referred to as ‘the educated bourgeoisie’.”

Who Really Invented The Telephone?

Did Alexander Graham Bell really invent the telephone? “Documents marked ‘confidential’ that recently were found buried in the archives of the Science Museum in London suggest British telephone executives covered up the fact that a German science teacher invented a working telephone 13 years before Alexander Graham Bell created a somewhat similar device.”

Pew’s Barnes Connection…

John Anderson wonders if the Pew Charitable Trust’s recent change in legal foundation status is a positive thing for the Barnes Collection. “If indeed under its new identity the Pew can control the Barnes’s purse strings, it will put a whole new complexion on the proposed plan should it be approved by the court. It makes it look less like the ‘rescue’ it has been portrayed as and more like the “takeover” critics (such as myself) have called it. For in controlling the money, the Pew would have de facto control over the Barnes Foundation itself, with a powerful role in determining the future character and direction of the Barnes.”