By some measures you could say this has been a good season for the Broadway musical. But it hasn’t been, really. Where are the new songs? The really new work that worked? “There’s a real reluctance on the part of producers to take on new composers because to some degree no one is sure what a Broadway show is supposed to sound like anymore. Is it supposed to sound like Michael John LaChiusa? Or Alan Menken? If the Broadway sound were the pop music of the day, which it used to be, it would sound like hip-hop, but I don’t think anyone feels there’s much of a Broadway audience for that at the moment.”
Month: December 2003
Actor Alan Bates, 69
“Sir Alan had a long career in the theatre, cinema and television. The brooding good looks that brought him early success in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger matured into a talent for a wide range of modern and classical roles.”
Poetry – A Year After The $100 Million
It’s been a year since Poetry magazine was told it had received $100 million in a bequest. “Staffers have a lot of general ideas on how to use the grant, including reaching out to the business community, but nothing specific has been decided. The foundation expects soon to hire a president who can organize and implement what board president Deborah Cummins calls a strategic plan. “We can’t do anything until we have a strategic plan,” she says. “We’ve never been in this position before — the ones giving out the money. We’ve always been on the other side of the desk, writing grant applications.”
Label Sales: This Can’t Be Good For The Music Business
The sale and dismantling of two of the best music labels in 2003 bodes ill for the music business. “Those two developments, both announced in the fall and awaiting governmental approval, represent a tipping point – the moment when, with swift decisiveness, the patient, long-term approach to record-making that prevailed at the major labels through much of the rock era bit the dust.”
Best Books Of 2003
What were the great books of 2003? Guardian and Observer critics and celebrities make their picks.
Not Many Great Art Thieves, But They’re Out There
Much of the great art in UK homes is vulnerable to theft, says an expert in recovering stolen art. “Stealing this kind of art is probably the dumbest thing a thief can do. There’s no resale market for it and trying to get any kind of ransom paid is not easy. But the great houses are available to these people and they are prepared to target them. They are not taking this art for some Mr Big, they are just taking it to have it – half the time they give it away to their friends – and the police are not very good at getting these paintings back.”
Building Plans Altering Landscape Made Famous By Cezanne
Plans to cut down trees and build 78 houses near a town west of Paris made famous by paintings by Paul Cezanne has amgered many. “While it is an exaggeration to claim, as some locals do, that the low, curving hill on the road to Claude Monet’s Giverny is the Ile de France’s answer to Aix’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, views of the village are as recognisable today from the opposite bank of the Seine as they were when Cézanne visited his childhood friend Emile Zola 120 years ago.”
London Buildings Projected Live
London’s buildings and monuments are lit up this season with projected images, transforming the architecture into fantasy objects.
Germany’s New Generation Of Writers
“A new generation of writers may have emerged in Germany over the past decade, but this renaissance in story-telling has gone largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. A growing unwillingness on the part of especially large U.S. publishing houses to wager a bet on translated novels means that many of Germany’s promising young authors remain inaccessible, thus enhancing the impression that this country’s literary masters have kept their postwar focus on history and politics.”
Today’s Libraries: Books Or DVD’s?
Increasingly, libraries are spending more of their budgets on multimedia and less on books. “The good news for movie fans is that their local library looks more and more like a Blockbuster. The ominous news for book fans is the same: As budget-squeezed public libraries rush to buy DVDs for an insatiable public, branches must act more like multimedia centers and less like temples of the printed page.”
