Author: Douglas McLennan

OK, JUDGE IT BY ITS COVER

Penguin Classics, those ubiquitous UK paperbacks with the orange covers, have received serious book jacket face-lifts, and sales are now soaring. Penguin UK art director John Hamilton hired England’s best young designers to “perk up 60 of Penguin’s warhorse titles, quadrupling the sales of 20th century greats like Fitzgerald, Forster, and Camus and bringing literature in close proximity to Backstreet Boy biographies.” – Metropolis

THE CATS THAT REFUSED TO DIE

What are we on here – Life No. 687? “Cats,” the show that wouldn’t go away, has extended its run on Broadway to September. Producers had announced earlier this year that the show would close in June. But: “After the Feb. 20 closing announcement, ticket sales for the Andrew Lloyd Webber tuner topped $1.5 million during the first week, rising to a total of $4.7 million over four weeks. The show has performed at an average of 94% capacity since mid-February, selling out twice in the last 10 weeks. Prior to the closing announcement, capacity had occasionally dipped below the 50% benchmark.” – Variety

THE HUM IS BACK

When the feature film was invented all those years ago, there was a hum of excitement about its miraculous potential. The hum has returned, as digital technologies and the internet once again hold out a sense of amazing possibility. “The excitement that leaps off the news pages was much like the heat of the Edison-Griffith days: the sense that mankind was making a leap forward in consciousness at such speed and of such importance that no one could yet calculate its size or reach.” – The New Republic

PRODUCTION VALUES

“There was a time, little more than a hundred years ago, when operas, like plays, got themselves on without the help of a producer and there was, as yet, no distinction between the work and how it was put on. The reason is that throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century a large proportion of the repertoire consisted of works appearing for the first time, and since their staging was unconditionally determined by the theatrical conventions which the composer and librettist would have had in mind when they wrote the work, production as we now think of it wasn’t an issue.” – New York Review of Books

CHINA’S NEW PRESIDENT-ELECT —

— vows to make Taiwan a cultural power. Chen Shui-bian said Taiwan has managed to create an economic miracle over the past five decades. But “we must make continued efforts to boost Taiwan’s cultural development.” Noting that cultural development won’t be accomplished with a “miracle”  he said that “devotion and perseverance are needed to refine local cultural essence to win it worldwide recognition.” – China Times

A REAL CIRCUS

Australia’s federal government gave in to the State of Victoria’s demands and announced a $2.6 million package to establish the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. In return the Victorian Government went along with bigger funding for the arts nationally.  Victoria had refused to support the Feds’ funding plan because “it offered greater financial support to the Sydney Theatre Company than the Melbourne Theatre Company.” – Sydney Morning Herald

HITLER’S ART DEALER, —

— Karl Haberstock, has been a major ongoing donor of Germany’s Municipal Art Museum in Ausburg. The museum, which has been publicly denounced by the World Jewish Congress, has finally agreed to investigate the provenance of the museum’s more questionable works and to open its archives to the public over the Internet. – Wired (Reuters)

BAD (BU HAO) BOOK

Zhou Weihui’s book “Shanghai Baby” has sold perhaps 100,000 copies in China, making it something of a hit. But Zhou’s publisher has now had the page proofs and all of the books in stock destroyed, saying that the novel is “in poor taste and that Ms. Zhou, 27, was too outlandish.” State media are denouncing Zhou as “decadent, debauched and a slave of foreign culture” and thousands of copies of the book are being destroyed even while the book seems to have found an audience. – New York Times