The design of Toronto’s new opera house is… well… pretty dull. “There’s nothing wrong with the new complex, but instead of something spectacular, it is polite, well mannered, deferential, even self-effacing. That would be fine if it were anything else, but this is, after all, an opera house, not a downtown shopping centre. What is opera if not spectacle?”
Blog
Now That’s A Lot Of Penguins
Penguin is offering a collection of every book it has published. “Laid down page by page and end to end, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection would stretch about 84 kilometres, or about the same distance as a morning commute to downtown Toronto from Kitchener. And it can all be yours — all half a million pages of it — for the low price of $7,989.99.”
The Actors And The Cattle Call
“For the last quarter century, for five days every summer, the League of Washington Theatres has held an open audition — a cattle call for local actors. Eight hundred or so people get to shovel their head shots, résumés and 90-second monologues into the faces of auditors from a couple of casting agencies and 54 local theaters (more precisely, 53 local theaters and, for some reason, the Actors Theatre of Louisville). Your odds aren’t great, but sometimes people get discovered and cast in meaty roles.”
What Happened To Sexy Music?
“Switch on the radio, grab a glance at MTV. Because something odd is happening, and it’s been going on for a while now. Here, it appears that there are few women or men anywhere to be heard. There are the breathy voices of ingenues; the mewling of babies; the shouts of a teenage tantrum; the whines of adolescent boys. BoyzIIMen? Please.”
Mass Shakespeare For Kids
Ten thousand children from 400 schools in the UK are taking part is a mass shakespeare event. “The event – One Night of Shakespeare – is a collaboration between the BBC and Shakespeare Schools Festival. Organisers hope to enter the Guinness World Records for the most performances of Shakespeare on one night. Pupils will perform their own interpretations of shortened versions of some of Shakespeare’s plays, directed and produced by their teachers.”
Saatchi Omits Brits
Charles Saatchi, long a champion of Brtish artists, is presenting a show without any homegrown talent. “Saatchi last omitted British artists from an exhibition in the 1987 New York Now show in his north London gallery.”
How Filesharing Decision Will Chill Innovation
Fallout from this week’s Supreme Court decision on filesharing? Lawrence Lessig says it will chill innovation over the next decade. “By making it a process that goes through the courts, you’ve just increased the legal uncertainty around innovation substantially and created great opportunities to defeat legitimate competition. You’ve shifted an enormous amount of power to those who oppose new types of competitive technologies. Even if in the end, you as the innovator are right, you still spent your money on lawyers instead of on marketing or a new technology.”
Canadian Movie Box Office Slide Worse Than US
Canadian movie box office grosses are down even more than those in the US. “Figures compiled for the Toronto Star by the Nielsen EDI box-office tracking firm show that since the slide began in February for weekend movie attendance in North America, the drop has been worse in Canada for 14 of the 18 weekends. The average weekend drop during the slump is 12.9 per cent for North America and 17.36 per cent in Canada.”
CPB “Bias” Report Attacked
A report commissioned by Corporation for Public Broadcasting head Kenneth Tomlinson on the political bias of public broadcasting shows is “amateurish.” The report labels guests on these programs “liberal,” “conservative” or “neutral,” or categorizes them by such descriptions as “pro-Bush,” “anti-Bush,” “support administration,” “oppose administration.”
The Busy Mr. Wheeldon
“Christopher Wheeldon has split a lot of pants lately. And if his rehearsal antics aren’t quite as outre as those of Mark Morris, no one in the dance world would be surprised to learn that Wheeldon’s demeanor is tilting in that direction. Just as Morris emerged in the ’80s as the savior of modern dance, Wheeldon has, since 2000, been tagged as the great hope of classical ballet. And he’s busy.”