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Playwright Veto: When You Can’t Do It That Way

A Philadelphia theatre tries to mount an all-female production of “Grease” but the musical’s creators object. So “how much control does a creator retain after releasing a play for production? When does a director’s interpretation override an author’s intention? There is a “strong presumption” in the theater community to protect the intentions of the playwright, and that outrageous staging could be framed as a copyright violation. Whether a court would side with the playwright or the producer in such a case is uncertain, because almost no cease-and-desist letters result in court action.”

Podcasts For Fun And Profit

Is podcasting breaking in to the big time? “Earlier this month, talk-show host Rush Limbaugh began offering podcasts of his shows for $50 a year, and competitors like The Dr. Laura Schlessinger Program may follow his lead. Meanwhile, commercial and public radio stations are trying to figure out where they fit in the podsphere and how they can make a buck by filling up your MP3 player.”

Gallup: Americans Don’t Trust Newspapers, TV

American news media are having a difficult time. A new poll says public confidence is falling. “Those having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers dipped from 30% to 28% in one year, the same total for television. The previous low for newspapers was 29% in 1994. Since 2000, confidence in newspapers has declined from 37% to 28%, and TV from 36% to 28%, according to the poll.”

Minnesota Flunks Couch Potato Test

Minneapolis/St. Paul has consistently lower TV viewership than other major metropolitan cities. “Only 59 percent of us tuned in during weeknights last month, compared with 68 percent in top-ranked Philadelphia, according to a study by Nielsen Media Research. Why? Our region is too wealthy, too well-educated, too wired and too white, researchers say.”

A Wonderful Romance – Gay Romance Novel Looks For Success

Is the gay male romance novel coming into its own? It’s “a world where there are never cowards, only condoms; each of the heroes has a brain, even if it takes until the end of the story for one of them to use it; and the abs, if not tin, most likely resemble iron.” This month, encouraged by successes so far, publisher is “aiming for the big time, with 12,500 copies of ‘Hot Sauce’ in print and fervent hopes that with gay marriage in the news — and legal in their own state — gay men may be more willing than ever to claim their inner Cinderella and read up on Prince Charming.”

Da Vinci Code Spurs Interest In Cracking CIA Sculpture

“The race to find the secrets of Kryptos, a sculpture inside a courtyard at the CIA’s heavily guarded headquarters in Langley, Virginia, may be reaching a climax. And interest has soared since Dan Brown hid references to Kryptos on the cover design for his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, and suggested it might play a role in his next novel, The Solomon Key.”

Europe Gets Into The Crime Wave

Where once crime fiction came from downtown Los Angeles, or the east end of London, these days the best are from Europe. “Traditionally, British readers have a horror of translated novels. Europeans have always bought up our crime writers, from PD James to Ian Rankin, but we’re a nation for whom the words ‘French exchange’ still have the power to instil terror. Yet sales of translated European crime fiction have increased fivefold in the past four years.”

Of Music And Architecture

“There has always been a close relationship between music and architecture, experimental or otherwise, in terms of structure, pattern and aesthetics, even though sound ultimately describes immaterial space. Plainchant, for example, somehow belongs to Romanesque abbeys, even though its origins are much older, just as Bach is all but synonymous with baroque churches. For better or worse, Wagner conjures images of the fairy-tale, alpine fantasmagoria of Neuschwanstein, the Sleeping Beauty castle built by Wagner’s indulgent patron, Ludwig II. The avant-garde music of the 20th century has its architectural counterparts, too>”

Spacey Pulls Out Of Old Vic Production, Fans Protest

Kevin Spacey suddenly pulled out of a production at London’s Old Vic, which he has run for the past year. And ticket-buyers, who had gobbled up £1.2 million worth of ducats “for the cash-strapped Old Vic – a figure almost unprecedented for a straight play in the West End – are unhappy. Still, “espite his critically unsuccessful first season on the South Bank, with unenthusiastic or bad reviews for the first two plays he staged, Cloaca and National Anthems, a recent poll suggests that his support remains solid.”