“Two years ago, the Rev. Robert B. Lawton, the new Jesuit president of Loyola Marymount University, began an ambitious, and costly, effort to turn the small Roman Catholic school, located in a staid, middle-class neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles International Airport, into a haven for aspiring filmmakers. ‘I looked at the landscape, and I thought there should be one values-based institution in the world that’s strong in teaching how to make images that shape and reflect us’.”
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This Year’s Tonys – Triumph Of The Little Guys?
It’s easy to think that the big musical wins all the Tonys. But sometimes the little guy wins too. “The most intriguing possibility – and the one most discussed by voters who were interviewed for this article – is a showdown between the blockbuster “Spamalot” and another little Off Broadway musical that made its way to the big time: “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”
UNESCO Fixes Up Its Showplace
Embarrassing, really, that the UN agency responsible for preserving world culture should have let its own shoplace headquarters crumble. Now a long-overdue restoration. “In recent years, large mesh nets have been hung from the façade of UNESCO’s main building to catch falling chunks of concrete. Roofs leaked and water damage plagued the basement where archives are stored. The neglected state of the UNESCO complex seems particularly paradoxical given the agency’s role as a guardian of the world’s cultural heritage. Since 2000, UNESCO has embarked on a campaign to add Modernist monuments to its World Heritage List, which obligates U.N. member states to care for sites in their territories.”
Dromgoole To Lead Globe
In a major surprise, Dominic Dromgoole has been tapped to lead London’s Old Globe Theatre. “Dromgoole, who has led the Oxford Stage Company for seven years, will become only the second artistic director of the reconstructed Elizabethan venue when he replaces Mark Rylance at the end of the year. Speaking about his new role yesterday, Mr Dromgoole said that although Shakespeare would remain the core work of the open-air theatre he hoped to present new writing and a wider range of European and British classics.”
Our Changing Shakespeare
The performance of Shakespeare has changed enormously in the past few decades. “Olivier and Gielgud gave to their times a vital new sensibility and naturalness. The skill with which they adapted to changing styles, as well as creating them, was a remarkable feature of both actors. But both had finished with live Shakespeare by the mid-1970s, and so stood apart from the many revisions that followed. Who knows what either would have thought about the three very different Macbeths earlier this year; or what Gielgud would have made of an audience breathing down his neck from three sides, having parked their plastic tumblers on the edge of a tiny studio stage; or how eagerly Olivier would have welcomed the kind of rehearsal in which the Duke of Exeter’s opinion can be rated as highly as that of King Henry.”
The More You Know, The Less You Remember?
Certain kinds of memory decrease the more knowledge you accumulate, reports a new study. “Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice. As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences. The ability to categorize is often very helpful, but this study shows how it can lead people to ignore individual details.”
Talent And Money – How Do You Sort Out The Artistry?
Atsushi Yamada conducts New york City Opera this week in Tokyo. “Mr. Yamada’s rise to the podium is a testament to the spirit of artistic entrepreneurship: he helped raise millions of dollars for City Opera’s foray to his native land, its first overseas tour in almost 20 years. But it also leads to questions about the role big money plays in the arts, particularly in the cash-desperate world of classical music, and how it influences artistic choices. Mr. Yamada, 41, studied and worked his way onto the City Opera’s conducting roster; the company says he is a genuine talent and is well liked at the house, where he is an established presence, having conducted eight performances so far. But he also had the backing of a City Opera board member who was his boss at Sony, a longtime supporter of the opera.
Will Corcoran Cancel Gehry Expansion?
“The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s chairman said Thursday that the 136-year-old institution is in such serious financial straits that it should suspend efforts to build its much-heralded new wing, for which architect Frank Gehry has already completed a design, and replace its longtime director.”
Movies For (And By) The Masses
“As digital technology reduces the cost and difficulty of making a movie, and memories of the dot-com bust fade, entrepreneurs, some less quixotic than others, are again looking at ways to bring the economic power and global reach of the Web to bear on the always difficult matter of film finance.”
Broadway’s Big Theatres Thinking Small
The big Broadway theatres usually stay dark between major productions. But “to keep the revenue streaming in during the summer, their owners are thinking small, as in the one- and two-month engagements commonly associated with smaller, Off Broadway theaters. This kind of microprogramming can be a smart financial hedge; it can also be risky business. You really have to do sell-out business before you open, because you can’t play catch up – there’s not enough time.”