Virtual casting for movies is catching on. “Dismissed in their early days, a mere three or four years ago, as one more way of exploiting desperate movie wannabes, Internet talent showcases are being embraced by the industry” who find them an easy way to screen talent. – San Francisco Examiner (Reuters) 06/20/00
Author: Douglas McLennan
NEW MASTERS, OLD METHOD
New York’s legendary Actor’s Studio – the workshop founded in 1947 by Lee Strasberg to champion his Method acting style – will now be led by Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn, and Harvey Keitel. All three will donate their time and teaching. – CNN
GARTH DRABINSKY TO STAGE COMEBACK
The discredited flamboyant theatre producer says he’ll produce a play in Toronto. – CBC
THE GOOD OLD DAYS
When Garth Drabinsky’s Livent North American theatre empire crashed and burned two years ago a lot of theatre people lost their jobs. A lot of theatres went dark too, and many of them still have not recovered. The arts economy in Toronto still has not recovered. “Livent made Toronto so much more attractive for anyone on an arts level. Livent did a lot, but talked about it even louder. They made Toronto shine.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
DIFFERENT OARS OF THE SAME BOAT
“Commercial theater relies on nonprofits to develop material, and commercial success can give those projects a much more lucrative shelf life – not only on Broadway but later in productions that rely on the cachet of Broadway success.” So why shouldn’t the two work together to help each other out? A theatre summit explore how. – Los Angeles Times
RAGS TO RICHES
Scottish painter Jack Vettriano’s life story reads like Horatio Alger: a miner’s son, he only started painting at 21 and was rejected from art school repeatedly. But now he’s Britain’s most commercially popular artist, with original work selling for up to £40,000 and posters of his work outselling those of Monet. – The Telegraph (UK)
NEW YORKER STILL RULES
Even before the issue is off the newsstands, two of the four debut short story writers published in the current New Yorker fiction issue have signed book deals. – Inside.com
VOICE OF A NON-GENERATION
Dave Eggers has been anointed the new new thing for his debut book. And certainly the attention is well deserved. But many of the glowing tributes miss the point of his “anti” memoir. In fact, it’s more like an “ultra” memoir, “almost confessional in its eagerness to put virtually every question of substance, memory, and motive plainly before the reader. And the habits that mark Eggers’s writing – the suspicion of all that purports to be authentic, the constant urge to peer behind the curtain – seem less like examples of “the latest postmodern hardware,” than characteristics of a certain generational vernacular, whose sources are widely recognized (six hours of television a day, advertising metastasized to every cranny of life, and the conventions of post-Watergate journalism, to name a few), but whose real purpose is just as widely misunderstood. – American Prospect
NO HOME TO OPERA
Believe it or not, Canada does not have even one theater dedicated to opera. Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company – the country’s largest – has been trying for years to build one. But the obstacles are fierce, and Canadian governments, which will have to help out if a house is to be built, seem to be hurting the cause, not helping it. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
THE BATTLE OF BRITTEN
From about 1945 up until the ’60s Benjamin Britten was lionized as the Great English Composer. But as he failed to embrace the more intellectual rigors of serialism and atonality he was demoted in critical reputation. But these many years later, Britten is more performed than any other 20th Century English composer. “Though not all of Britten’s music is of the first rank, much of it is comparable in quality to the finest compositions of the giants of modernism.” – Commentary