“Biographer Stacy Schiff has won the second annual George Washington Book Prize for “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America” — walking away with $50,000 and proving once again that the Founding Father industry is alive and well.”
Blog
A Stake Through Lestat’s Broadway Heart
After only 33 regular performances, the Broadway vampire musical “Lestat” is to close. “Lestat — which is said to have cost more than $12 million — was the Broadway debut of Warner Brothers and involved creative best sellers like Elton John, Bernie Taupin and Anne Rice.”
Ads Come To the Theatre
Movie theatres have been running ads for years. Now live theatre is getting them. “The advertisement, which is itself advertised as the world’s first live theatrical commercial, is a creation of Visit London, a tourist organization. There have already been performances of the live commercial on stages in Dublin and Hamburg. ‘They’re a captive audience. They can’t switch channels or change over or walk out once the thing is started’.”
Anti-Poverty Activists To Protest Stratford Opening
Protesters are planning to demonstrate at the opening of this year’s Stratford Festival. “The protesters are demanding the Ontario government raise welfare rates by 40 per cent. The groups have said they are targetting Stratford’s black tie event because the opening night gala usually draws both prominent government officials and business and community leaders, ‘a Who’s Who of the rich and vile,’ says a notice on the OCAP website.”
Is America Heading To Cultural Divide?
Steven Tepper and Bill Ivey argue that a rift in America’s culture is opening up between those who can access ever more sophisticated cultural offerings and those who are slaves to the WalMart CD choices.
Book Expo Panel On Publishing Conservatives
“Saturday afternoon at the huge new Convention Center here, filled to capacity this past weekend by that massive annual trade show of the book biz called BEA (BookExpo America), a group of conservative editors and sales execs took a chance. They gathered in their chosen venue, Room 203AB, for a panel on ‘Selling and Promoting Right of Center Books Via Left of Center Channels’.”
London Galleries Cash In On Contemporary
“Britain’s once sleepy contemporary art market has exploded. The problem is that its expansion coincides with a financial squeeze on the publicly funded institutions that have long dominated new art in Britain, and this could imperil the delicate balance of power between the public and private sectors.”
The Lou Harrison Legacy
A festival celebrates the ultimate outside. “Harrison’s music does not stand apart from so much as, like a giant sponge, absorb all around it. A feisty individualist, he was an outsider artist who happened to be the ultimate musical insider. He was an expert geneticist-composer who made musical hybrids no one had ever heard before, particularly in his pioneering grafting of Asian musical instruments and genres onto Western ones. And he wrote melodies — gorgeous, unpredictable, brain-sticking melodies — with the best of them.”
Two New Manhattan Towers Are A (Brilliant) Throwback
“The condo market that helped propel the change has begun to cool in many American downtowns. But the shift in skyscraper architecture from commercial to residential has been so sharp and widespread that it’s difficult not to think of Norman Foster and David Childs as an anachronistic pair: as, say, a couple of contemporary composers who have produced dueling string quartets or two television network executives deciding to launch competing half-hour, laugh-track sitcoms that also happen to be very well-made.”
Summing Up The Met Opera’s Volpe Years
“Volpe admits that ticket sales have plummeted at the Met, but blames 9/11 traumas. He points strenuously to a few innovative productions, but rests his laurels on a stubborn pursuit of tradition. There is no question that this dictator kept an orderly house in a world notorious for chaos. Even Volpe’s detractors praise his organisational skills. It cannot be surprising that he will soon join a consulting firm run by his buddy Rudolph Giuliani, ex-mayor of New York.”