Just a year ago, Seattle’s ACT Theatre was “fighting for its life after a severe financial meltdown threatened to end the company’s nearly 40-year tenure as one of Seattle’s major professional theaters. Given the relative suddenness of ACT’s fiscal emergency and its need to raise $1.5 million fast to keep its Union Street operation going, survival was no sure thing. But along with restraint and realism, there’s the breezy scent of hope circulating through ACT’s staff offices and rehearsal halls.”
Month: April 2004
Colorado’s Next Conductor?
Who will succeed Marin Alsop as music director of the Colorado Symphony? “The search apparently has been whittled down to a quartet. Nothing official, but we’re banking on Roberto Minczuk, Jeffrey Kahane, Miguel Harth-Bedoya and David Lockington.”
Tiny Theatre, Tiny Town
The tiny Opera House in the small town of Reedley, California has a stage that’s only 14 feet wide. The 1903 theatre has been restored and a local theatre company has taken up residence. “Whether Reedley can get used to a year-round theater company in a town that isn’t big enough to support a movie theater is the question. Think of it this way: To sell out a season, almost 10% of Reedley’s population (pegged in the 2000 census as 20,700) would have to attend each show.”
The New Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum will soon reopen after a $63 million overhaul. “The project includes a new lobby, a multistoried new front entrance pavilion and a breathtaking public plaza with dancing-water fountains, cherry trees and a “front stoop” of public seating, all of it extending a common-people-friendly welcome mat to the borough of Brooklyn.”
Music For Mind And Body
A new study says that you can improve your health (mental and physical) by working out to certain kinds of music. “According to the journal Heart & Lung, a team of Ohio State University researchers has found that exercising to music — at least to Antonio Vivaldi — not only improves physical conditioning, it also improves mental conditioning. People get smarter if they work out while listening to certain music.”
Utah Museum Returns Looted Painting
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has returned a small painting – “Les Jeunes Amoureux” by François Boucher to the son of the man it was looted from in Paris. It was “part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after a Jewish art dealer, Andre Jean Seligmann, fled with his family to the United States. The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector in 1993.”
Fleisher: Of Pianos, Hands And Botox
Leon Fleisher is back playing the piano two hands. And how did he cure his famous hand malady? “His worldwide search for a cure ended in the mid-1990s when an injection of Botox, of all things, relaxed his fingers, allowing him to play two-handed piano for the first time in decades. (Botox, a toxin that causes botulism, is better known for its cosmetic use as a muscle relaxant that smoothes the wrinkles of aging celebrities, among others.) Now in the middle of a worldwide tour, Fleisher has just signed with Vanguard Classics to record his first two-handed album in 40 years.”
Shakespeare To The Masses
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare tour is the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history. Since September, seven professional companies have been presenting five plays around the county, and will have been seen by audiences in 100 cities and towns, as well as on 16 military bases. “Later this month, the NEA will announce the addition of 21 professional nonprofit theater companies to the tour as part of Phase II. They will do a range of the Bard’s plays. By the time both phases are complete, at the end of next year, ‘We hope to have introduced 1 million children to Shakespeare’.”
The Gore! The Horror! (We Love It)
We seem to be more and more fascinated by images of gore and mutilation. The raw aftermath of violence and death is increasingly captured in images that many people find both repelling and compelling. “The contemporary iconography of carnage is unprecedented and unique in its visceral force.”
Tinkering With Edinburgh (It’s What Makes It Great)
Brian McMaster has been programming the Edinburgh Festival since 1992. He’s constantly tinkering with ways to bring in unlikely audiences. “It is this engagement with the audience that makes the International Festival seem so alive. McMaster’s tenure has coincided with increasing collaboration between all the festivals, so that there is growing self-assurance to the city. Once, almost every resident would meet August with a scowl, fleeing if they could, but now only the most curmudgeonly swears at the thesps on the high street. McMaster has brought us in, and without dumbing down.”