“The musicians’ union voted last week to ratify a contract modification that will enable the financially strapped symphony to save $1 million annually in the next two years. ‘It is a stunningly significant sacrifice from our 68-person orchestra,’ David Chambless Worters, the symphony’s president and CEO, said in an interview.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Transforming An Octavio Paz Poem Into Theatre
“Heavily influenced by Surrealist imagery, and laden with references to Mesoamerican and Greco-Roman myths, Paz’s 1957 poem is a rapturous, metaphysical rumination on erotic life forces and the search for an authentic self (or selves) within other people, other cultures and the flow of time and history.” The performance aims to “immerse audiences in Paz’s … universe.”
With Library Books Stolen, Borders Smells Synergy
In an effort to “replace some of the 1,300 children’s picture books that have been stolen from the [Port Orchard Library in Washington state] over the past two months,” the “librarian selected about 60 of the more popular books, and Borders set them up in a rack in the store…. If customers want to buy and donate them, Borders will package them and send them to the library.”
In Camden, NJ, Using Art To Alter A Downtrodden Area
“There’s a new art gallery on Broadway. In Camden. At the Rescue Mission. ‘It’s got people buzzing,’ says the Rev. Al Stewart, the mission’s longtime pastor. There’s lots more to talk about: the cluster of arts and cultural organizations slowly emerging around Broadway and Ferry Avenue in the city’s down-but-not-out Waterfront South neighborhood.”
SFMOMA Expansion Contest Narrows To Four Firms
“The finalists include one of the world’s best-known firms, Foster + Partners, … and cult favorite David Adjaye Associates, whose only completed building in the United States is a small museum in Denver. The other finalists are Snøhetta, a Norwegian firm that designed the National Sept. 11 Memorial now being built in Lower Manhattan, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro….”
John Williams Talks Composing — And The Concert Stage
“You have a good day, you have a bad day, next week you look at what you wrote last week and it’s rubbish and you throw it out,” he says. “I write all the time, not so much for pleasure but mostly from habit, which is what anybody who writes anything needs to do. It’s pretty good, or it isn’t, and I try to do better next time.”
Pondering Envy Of San Francisco’s SF JAZZ Center
The $60 million complex will be “the only free-standing jazz arts center in the country…. For the first time, jazz in America will have a counterpart to symphony hall, an edifice that proclaims the value of jazz to anyone who sees it on the street.” So should Chicago be envious?
Disabled Actors, Nearly Invisible On TV, Don’t Have To Be
The “Glee” character who uses a wheelchair ought to be played by an actor with a disability, some actors argue — and so should plenty of other TV roles, like “the lawyer, the best friend, with the wheelchair never once being mentioned.” Enough with the “triumph over adversity” story lines, they say.
Iraq Opens A Cultural Center in DC
“Sixty-three percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 could not locate Iraq on a map in 2006, according to a National Geographic poll, and the cultural center aims to fill in the blanks for the public. That will involve poetry readings and live music and displaying modern art and ancient artifacts.”
Why Broadway Couldn’t Love Enron
“Rupert Goold’s production of Lucy Prebble’s broad-stroke comic strip was as gimcrack as any American idiot could want. … Not since Faye Dunaway moaned ratings numbers during a sex scene in ‘Network’ have lust and power been so entertainingly entangled.” But someone forgot to let the audience in on the joke.