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Are Voice Actors Becoming Obsolete?

The latest trend in animated films has been to cast well-known actors in the lead roles, and market (at least in part) on that star power. But to the little-known pros who have spent a lifetime perfecting their skills as voice actors, this is a revolting predicament, and many worry that their considerable talents will soon become expendable, as Hollywood insists on bigger and bigger names to headline animated flicks.

Sandow: Orchestras Give Audiences Every Reason To Stay Away

AJ blogger Greg Sandow wades into Drew McManus’s Take A Friend To The Orchestra project, and isn’t entirely sure why anyone should be so enthusiastic about the form. “There’s a dead zone between orchestras and their audience. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on. They don’t know what really happens at the concerts they hear—what chances are taken, what musical problems are solved, what anyone is trying to express. And of course any smart person who comes in from the outside can sense this. It’s engraved, somehow, on the whole orchestra experience: the blank rituals, the empty formality, the distant, scholarly program notes, all the rules about when to applaud, the very look of the people in the audience, who for the most part, and through no fault of their own, are only passively engaged. Who can blame anyone for staying away?”

Don’t Write Radio’s Obit Just Yet

With the rise of satellite radio, portable MP3 players, and podcasting, many cultural observers have already declared traditional radio to be dead, or at least on its way towards becoming the type of broadcast wasteland that the AM band became following the rise of FM in the 1970s (but before AM’s resurgence in the 1990s on the back of sports and talk formats.) But the facts simply don’t back up such a simplistic view of the coexistence of old and new media: the latest market study of those stuffy old radio stations shows plenty of profit yet to be had. And as long as there is profit potential, there is simply no chance of radio giving up the ghost.

Scottish Opera Soldiers On, Into An Uncertain Future

As Scottish Opera prepares to cease operations for a year as part of the government’s plan to “save” it, the company is mounting a touring production of Verdi’s Macbeth. But there may be no clearer indication of the fiscal and creative hole Scottish Opera faces than the cuts forced on this tour – only seven singers and a pianist are making the trip, and the entire chorus will be disbanded by summer’s end.

The Conductors You’ve Never Heard Of

There may not be a more thankless job in an American symphony orchestra than that of staff conductor. These baton twirlers enjoy none of the accolades accorded to music directors and guest conductors, get paid a fraction of what every other musician in the organization gets, and are expected to be fluent not only in all the standard repertoire, but also in Broadway showtunes and pops material. Most of the concerts they conduct will be before audiences of restless schoolchildren, and their names will almost never appear in a serious newspaper review. All that having been said, the job may be the best sink-or-swim training any musician can get, and many staff conductors have gone on to big things of their own.

SPAC Has A Lot Of Healing To Do

Upstate New York’s embattled Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) has elected a whole new board, taken steps to become more responsive to community concerns, and done its best to respond to a scathing internal report that blasted its previous leadership and programming decisions. All that having been said, however, SPAC’s finances have turned out to be in even worse shape than anyone had predicted, and one of the new board members speculated at this week’s annual meeting that the organization would likely have been bankrupt within a year had changes not been made.

TV’s Closest Season

This season was the closest ratings race ever for American TV networks. “For the first time in its two-decade history, Fox, once the upstart outsider, will win the network competition in the category of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, which every network but CBS defines as the yardstick of prime-time supremacy, because so many advertisers pay a premium to reach that group.”

The New School Starts A New Drama School

The New School’s 11-year association with the Actors Studio comes to an end as the school announces it is starting a new graduatee drama school. The decision to break with the Actors Studio is “a simple move toward more oversight and control over the program’s curriculum and staffing. The new acting program will be headed by Robert LuPone, who was nominated for a Tony Award as an actor in “A Chorus Line” on Broadway and was a producer of last year’s Tony-nominated play “Frozen.” He’ll be joined by Arthur Penn, the director of the original 1959 Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” and of the 1962 film version, who will act as the school’s artistic adviser.