The producers won’t be releasing grosses, and they’ll be charging $450 for the best seats in the house, but wait! Impecunious Broadway fans have a shot at seeing Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” from the front row for only $25, provided they don’t mind taking their chances in a lottery. Well, okay, it’ll cost ’em $26.50, counting the facility fee….
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Uzbek Theatre Director, A Seattle Resident, Is Killed
“Mark Weil, a prominent theater director in Uzbekistan whose productions caused controversy in the tightly controlled former Soviet state, was stabbed to death in the Uzbek capital, a theater spokeswoman said today. He was 55. Weil, a part-time Seattle resident who founded the Ilkhom theater more than 30 years ago, was attacked in front of his apartment building in Tashkent late Thursday night….”
Proms Reports Record Attendance
“This year’s BBC Proms season has attracted a record number of people to its concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Cadogan Hall. Organisers said more than 272,000 people had booked tickets, beating the previous high of 265,000 in 2001. There was also a 5% increase in ticket sales compared to last year.”
No More Park-And-Bark: Opera Singers Learn To Act
“Opera was born as a radical new form incorporating music and drama, but the partnership between the elements has been an uneasy and unequal one, with musical values having taken firm precedence through much of the art form’s history. For impresarios and generally for audiences too, superlative singing has always been considered to be of paramount importance.” But as standards evolve, acting skills are taking a more prominent role.
NY Choreographers Too Seldom Seen On Home Stages
“As dancegoing New Yorkers might hope, the living choreographers for whom their city is most renowned — Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris — are all scheduled to present new works in the coming 12 months and to revive beloved works from their past. So far so good. But too little of it will open in New York City. And there is no knowing when or even if some of it will be seen here.”
Addition Lets Philly Museum Meet The People Halfway
“Nothing about the opening this month of the (Philadelphia Museum of Art’s) Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building – the first public addition since the opening of the neoclassical temple in the 1920s – makes the (institution’s) mission less serious. But the 173,000-square-foot expansion represents the museum’s only suggestion in decades that its art is not necessarily tied to a building, and that it is ready to come down off its pedestal, literally and figuratively, to become part of a city neighborhood.”
Who Needs Sartre, Plath And Kerouac? Not Knopf.
The Alfred A. Knopf Inc. archive at the University of Texas makes you wonder how Knopf ever published all those Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. “The rejection files … include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (‘utterly untranslatable’), Isaac Bashevis Singer (‘It’s Poland and the rich Jews again’), Anaïs Nin (‘There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic’)….”
Has NBC Dissed A Built-In “Bionic” Fan Base?
“Gays and the Bionic Woman? Love her! Gays and Isaiah Washington? Not so much. Thus you have one of the Great Pop Cultural Dilemmas of 2007: What’s a thoroughly postmodern gay to do when one of the iconic heroines of ’70s television is relaunched on a network that eagerly embraces an actor who gets dumped from his hit show on another network after proving himself all too comfortable with a certain homophobic slur?”
At The Movies, Boy Nerds Rule. Others Need Not Apply.
“Hollywood is fat and happy, but the Summer of 2007 left me (and maybe you, too?) feeling oddly alienated, as if the big party had been going on somewhere else. More than ever, if you don’t belong to one of Hollywood’s cherished demographic groups, you’re simply not invited to the dance. This summer, teens ruled, especially teen boys. And not just teen boys, but teen boys at their pimpliest, stutteringest and downright geekiest.”
Madeleine L’Engle Dies At 88
“Madeleine L’Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn. … Her works included poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer, and almost all were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for answers to the questions that mattered most.”