London’s West End theatres had their best year ever at the box office in 2004. “Almost 12m people attended a West End show in 2004, generating receipts of £341,758,566. The arrival of big musicals including Mary Poppins and The Producers is credited with pushing up ticket sales.”
Blog
Is Christopher Wheeldon The Real Thing? (Maybe Not?)
Christopher Wheeldon is touted as dance’s next great genius. But Tobi Tobias is still to be convinced. “Most observers, dance critics in the lead, are so grateful for what Wheeldon can do, they don’t ask for much more. Me, I find nothing moving behind the craft—no hint of the deep feeling that can permeate ostensibly abstract work, no creation of an architectural universe that proposes a mysterious and absorbing world in itself.”
Do-It-Yourself Everything
“Neil Gershenfeld, a physicist and computer scientist who runs the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, envisions a time when many of us will have a “fabrication center” in our homes. We’ll be able to download a description of, say, a toaster — perhaps one we designed ourselves — to our computers, and then feed the designs and the raw materials into a personal fabricator. At the push of a button, almost like hitting “print,” the machine will spit it out.”
The Case For A Scorcese Oscar
Hollywood should be feeling guilty, writes Michael Wilmington. Martin Scorcese has deserved an Oscar as Best Director at least three times before. Yet he’s got nada. “Why should Marty Scorsese get the Oscar this time? More than anything else, because he’s earned it. Though there’s controversy about whether it’s really 2004’s best movie, The Aviator is currently the front-runner and favorite, by virtue of its pack-leading 11 nominations.” So is this the year?
Growing Ballet In Post-Apartheid South Africa
“In the world of dance, one of South Africa’s toughest townships may seem an unpromising place to start an academy for classical ballet. But hundreds of black children have been auditioning for the programme, part of an emerging generation that is taking the country’s arts into a new post-apartheid era.”
Strathmore – Suburban Culture, Urban Ambition
The new Strathmore Music Center in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC is an ambitious undertaking for a suburb. Benjamin Forgey writes that “the $100 million center is a traditional urban institution in a fast-changing suburban setting. It’ll contribute most significantly to the cultural life of its home county, of course, but, with the Baltimore Symphony treating it as a ‘second home,’ it’ll add choices for many music lovers in the metropolitan area. The architecture itself will be an attraction, eventually. In an age of prominent, in-your-face, innovative civic architecture, the center is a deceptive exception.”
Theatre Critics’ Lament
Any theatre critic who’s been on the job for a while starts to see the same weaknesses over and over. “Repeated weekly exposure to the legitimate stage, although occasionally resulting in an exquisitely attuned creature like John Lahr, for the most part creates individuals who are primarily aware that a lot of the same mistakes are being made in a lot of different places.”
The Schiller Phenomenon – Making It Big In London (After 200 Years)
Schiller was one of the great German dramatists. Yet his work has never played well in Britain until now. But now he’s a popular money-maker. “The idea that Schiller, shunned for the best part of two centuries by the British theatre, was now big box-office marked a historical watershed. So what has changed? And why is Schiller no longer box-office poison?”
The Anti-Gay Agenda
Protests over SpongeBob, complaints over gay being shown on a PBS cartoon, books that even mention homosexuality being taken off library shelves in Mississippi. What’s going on? “If you are a recently re-elected president with a strong conservative Christian base, and some elements of that base are throwing hissy fits over a sponge and a bunny or what’s on a university library shelf, it takes unwanted attention away from larger, more politically challenging matters relating to same-sex marriage bans, or free-marketing Social Security, or strengthening the anti-abortion movement — a movement that, as President Bush vowed on Jan. 24, ‘will not fail.’ The culture wars aren’t won on the battlefield. They’re won by playing a good shell game.”
The Hollywood Beat: Journalism Without A Net
Bernard Weinraub is retiring as Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times. After a tour covering the Vietnam war, Hollywood should have been a breeze. But “only in my 14 years here – most of it spent covering the movie industry, the rest covering television and music – did I come face to face with some of the more startling, and not always pleasant, truths about human behavior, my own included.”