“Charges have been stayed against Simon Lee, the British stage conductor and longtime Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator, over an incident that was alleged to have taken place in Toronto last summer during the finale of CBC-TV’s How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?“
Author: Matthew Westphal
First Impressions Of L.A.’s Annenberg Space For Photography
Christopher Knight: “Two things I like: It’s free, and it’s eclectic. […] ASP isn’t stuffy – the design is a mash-up of museum gallery, Apple Store and ArcLight Cinema – but it’s serious and friendly.” On the other hand: “Two things I don’t like: ASP has a corporate aura, and light is a problem.”
How Is The (Once-)Mighty NEA Funding Fall’n
“Thirty years ago, the NEA received a modest 12 cents per $100 of non-military discretionary spending. Today that is just 3 cents per $100. If the NEA had simply maintained its 1979 percentage of discretionary funding, its 2008 budget would have been $613 million.”
Columbia’s Miller Theatre Reaches Within For New Director
Melissa Smey, who had been general manager at what may be American classical music’s hippest venue, has been appointed Miller Theatre’s director. She had been filling the job on an acting basis ever since George Steel departed for his famously brief stint at The Dallas Opera and his new job running the troubled New York City Opera.
Cloris Leachman’s ‘Master Plan’: Become ‘Everybody’s Favorite Nutty Grandma’
Her “unlikely seven-week stint as the oldest contestant ever on [Dancing with the Stars] is just part of what the veteran actress calls her ‘master plan’ for an octogenarian career comeback … [T]he rollout also includes a one-woman show that Leachman has been performing in theaters across the country and on cruise ships, and a new autobiography.”
Does Fidelity To Beckett’s Text Stifle Beckett As Theatre?
“Perversely, it seems to me, familiarity has made these plays more inaccessible: their visual motifs are so well known beforehand that they are more easily dismissed. Godot is ‘the one where nothing happens’; Endgame is ‘the one with the old pair in the bins’; Happy Days is ‘the one about the woman buried in the sand’.”
Court Orders Return To Germany Of 16th-Century Book Looted In WWII
“A New York court ordered a book collector to return a 16th-century volume valued at $600,000 to a museum in Stuttgart, more than six decades after it was stolen by a U.S. army captain at the end of World War II.”
Is West Side Story Overrated?
The show’s new Broadway revival has Richard Zoglin thinking some heretical thoughts: that the script “seems too thin to live up to its ambitions”; wondering if Bernstein’s score “really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals”; asking “Who would know that the lyricist would grow up to be Stephen Sondheim?”
Manhattan Theatre Club Reduces Number Of Productions
The highly-regarded company announced that its 2009-10 season would offer six productions in place of the usual seven and that it would rent out its 150-seat Stage II rather than present its own work there. The good news: Among the stars on the MTC stage next season are beloved veterans Rosemary Harris and Linda Lavin.
Pop-Rocker ‘England Dan’ Seals Dies At 61
“[A]s part of the duo England Dan and John Ford Coley [he] sang the hit ‘I’d Really Love to See You Tonight’ and other 1970s soft-rock touchstones… Although he was a Texas native, Seals called himself England Dan to avoid trading on the family name that his older brother Jim had made famous as half of another soft-rock pairing, Seals & Crofts.”