The financial crisis currently enveloping Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre eerily mirrors the situation at the Cleveland San Jose Ballet several years ago. Cleveland-San Jose folded in 2000, but PBT officials insist that the same fate won’t befall their company, and further stress that the rumors of an impending merger with some other Pittsburgh-area arts group are extremely premature.
Month: April 2005
Terrorism, Meet Your Operatic Muse
“The escalating artistic arms race between London’s two rival opera houses, Covent Garden and the Coliseum, reached a new level of threat this weekend. Both venues are in the middle of staging block-busting versions of Richard Wagner’s epic and expensive Ring cycle, but audiences at the Coliseum last night were left reeling from more than the music after the English National Opera mounted a violent coup de thétre. In what will come to be regarded by opera fans as a moment of bizarre heresy – or of creative triumph – Brunnhilde, the leading character in the ENO’s new production of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, was portrayed as a suicide bomber.”
Left Coast Lurching Right?
Everyone knows that Hollywood is nothing but a bunch of self-aggrandizing liberals peddling their socialist claptrap to a gullible nation of consumers, right? Wrong. “Since the re-election of George W. Bush last fall, cultural conservatives have been flexing their muscles not only in the political arena but also on the entertainment front.” Will the next CSI spinoff be set in Crawford, Texas? Will MTV’s next Spring Break special stress abstinence and bedrock family values? Will Don Rumsfeld be the next James Bond? Anything’s possible…
Sweet Relief
The bizarre on-again, off-again story of the Broadway-bound (for now) revival of Sweet Charity is a whopper of a tale, even by theatre standards. “According to the show’s ad campaign tagline, the tale of Sweet Charity is that of ‘one woman’s belief that in the midst of adversity, she will find hope and the strength to know that someday all of her dreams will come true.’ The offstage story is of one revival’s belief that in the midst of adversity, it will find hope and the strength to know that someday some of its dreams and even, if one believes in miracles, a smidgen of profit will come true.”
A&E, Hold The A
When the cable networks Bravo and A&E (Arts & Entertainment) launched, many saw it as the final death knell for PBS – after all, if not one, but two profit-driven cable networks could air highbrow arts programming and script-driven Victorian dramas and make money doing it, what reason was there for the existence of a subsidized network airing the same stuff? These days, however, Bravo and A&E have remade themselves in the reality-TV model, and neither seems even remotely interested in airing any arts-related programming at all. A&E, in particular, now disdains the idea of highbrow TV, and points out that its viewer demographics are much improved since changing formats.
The Movies About The Movies
As DVD sales have become an increasingly indispensable part of Hollywood’s ever-evolving revenue stream, a new generation of specialized DVD producers and consultants has sprung up to plan, create, and manage all those hours of “extras” that make a DVD marketable. “Where feature films are mostly put together by producers pitching scripts to studios, which then attach a director and stars, the DVD business only has one star: the original film’s director. A director’s involvement – which means access to the set, extra footage and even ideas for special features – can mean the difference between a passable DVD and a great one.” As a result, directors are beginning to attach themselves at the hip to the top DVD creators available.
What’s Happening To Hirst?
Damien Hirst has moved on from the days when he exhibited dead sharks and giant ashtrays, but has he really advanced his thinking at all? A new exhibit of Hirst’s photorealist paintings seem like just so much rehashed rebellion, says Michael Kimmelman, “blithely lacking finesse, [ignoring] photorealism’s first goals and [aspiring] only to be passingly ghoulish. And absent invention, they hang there like corpses… The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.”
The Booming Business of Art Prizes
“Over the last few years, museums large and small have started awarding their own prizes, usually named after the institution and sponsored by a corporate donor, to capitalize on the glamour associated with contemporary art. To burnish their appeal, many of the new awards are modeled on the Tate Modern’s venerable Turner Prize, which has evolved into a nationally televised event that attracts celebrity presenters like Madonna and habitually polarizes the British press… Indeed, the new art prize circuit has a circular quality, with many of the same artists nominated again and again, and many of the same jurors serving on multiple committees.”
A Year of Change In Boston
In his first year with the Boston Symphony, there is no question that James Levine has made a distinct mark on the city’s musical life, garnering praise but also creating controversy with his devotion to complex and dissonant music. “Whether he can carry the audience along with him is still an open question, although one is tempted to say that if he can’t, nobody can. If he is driving some people out of the hall, there is a gratifying new component of young faces and prominent members of Boston’s musical community who didn’t make a habit of attending [former BSO director Seiji Ozawa’s] concerts.”
Taking The Road Less Traveled
When it was announced last week that Philadelphia Orchestra principal violist Roberto Diaz would be leaving his position to head the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, the near-universal reaction from the rest of the orchestra world could best be described as, “Huh?!” The fact is, musicians holding plum positions in the world’s top orchestras almost never quit mid-career, and many have to be pried from their chairs when they can no longer do the job. Diaz, a legitimate star in the (admittedly obscure) world of the viola, now holds the distinction of having walked away from not one, but two highly regarded orchestras, and he couldn’t be happier.