“Seussical,” the much-anticipated musical, opened in Boston this week before its planned fall debut on Broadway. But the show got mixed to bad reviews in Boston, and may need to be reworked before going to New York. “Yesterday, theater sources said ‘Seussical’ would probably lose more than $1 million in Boston. Had the show opened to good reviews, the producers were prepared to add an extra week to the Boston run. That plan has now been abandoned.” – New York Post
Author: Douglas McLennan
ENDLESS LIVES
“Cats” the musical closes on Broadway this week, the longest-running show in Broadway history. But “it’s not as if the world will suddenly go ‘Cat’-less come Monday morning. You can rent the video version. You can wait for the PBS pledge drive airing of the version available on video. You can wait in the Kaiser Permanente waiting room of your choice, and eventually you will hear the Muzak version of ‘Memory’.” – Los Angeles Times
GUATEMALAN PALACE DISCOVERED
Archaeologists have found an enormous Maya palace built nearly 1,300 years ago in Guatemala. “Found at the site of Cancuén, which means ‘Place of Serpents’, on the Río Pasion in the Petén region, the three-story palace covers some 270,000 square feet has more than 170 rooms built around 11 courtyards. Its solid limestone masonry walls are six feet thick in places.” – Archaeology
FULL COVERAGE OF THE DOME DEBACLE
The future of London’s troubled Millennium Dome hangs in the balance after yesterday’s announcement that it needs an additional £47 million to stay open until the end of the year. – The Guardian
OPERA LOVER
A Danish billionaire has decided to pay the entire £118 million cost of building Copenhagen’s first opera house. – Ananova
LOST AND FOUND
Long believed lost, supposedly rediscovered and recorded in the 1990s, then “refound” nine months ago in the basement of a Moscow museum, Shostakovich’s Second Jazz Suite is finally being faithfully reconstructed to its original form for its premiere at Saturday night’s closing of The Proms. – The Telegraph (UK)
TAKE IT SITTING DOWN
When La Scala’s season opens next week with “La Bohème,” the opera house’s famous standing-room galleries will be empty, due to fire-safety regulations. “This is tragic news for its habitual dwellers, the feared and respected ‘loggionisti,’ the ardent opera buffs who sit or stand in the galleries and are said to dictate failure or success.” – New York Times
STAR OF TOMORROW
A Canadian singer has taken first place in Placido Domingo’s $50,000 world opera competition in Los Angeles. – Los Angeles Times
MORALITY R US
The US Senate is holding hearings next week on violence in the entertainment industry. The buzz is about what Hollywood film executives might be hauled in to testify. – Inside.com 09/07/00
THE AGITATION OF COGITATION
Muddy, brilliantly insightful, and often wildly impenetrable, 18th-century German philosopher Hegel has been called the “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” But after spending hundreds of hours of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Philosophy of Nature, what do you really have to show for it? A new biography examines the difficulties of reading in a Hegelian world. – The New Criterion