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The Morality Cops Look To Expand Their Jurisdiction

“With support from both Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to get even more aggressive about enforcing moral values throughout broadcasting, even putting cable television in its cross hairs and taking aim at Howard Stern’s right to talk dirty on satellite radio.” Still, there’s a fairly decent chance that many aspects of the FCC’s decency crusade will eventually face court challenges, and judges, even conservative ones, have historically been loath to allow limits on the First Amendment.

Will The New Puritanism Last?

Even if a majority of Americans claim to agree with the government’s recent crackdown on supposed indecency on the national airwaves, their viewing choices make it fairly clear that risk-taking television isn’t going away anytime soon. “The cold truth is, what viewers say they want — in polls, through organizations and elsewhere — rarely jibes with what the majority of us actually sit down to watch.”

Teaming Up

Six Hartford-area arts groups have joined forces to offer a multi-genre season ticket package designed to allow younger residents uninterested in tradition season passes to a single organization to pick and choose among the arts offerings available in the city. “The $99 price tag is a significant discount over regular priced tickets, more than 50 percent for some events,” and purchasers can redeem the vouchers at the local symphony, opera house, museum, theater, or dance company.

Well, It Beats Dragging Them Into The Street By Their Ears

A New York theater is trying a new technique to get audience members to turn off their rage-inducing cell phones. Staffers at the Brooks Atkinson Theater noticed that the public had become fairly immune to a simple prerecorded announcement asking for the phones to be shut down, so just before curtain, they’ve begun playing an obnoxious recording of cell phone rings so realistic that people all over the house dive for their phones in horror. “And so a new front may have been opened in the long, hard war against the rude and the clueless… With some of those people, polite appeals are a waste of time.”

Latinos Making Gains, But Will It Last?

There is a Latino theater boom going on all across America, and while the works of Latino playwrights may not exactly be exploding onto the stages of the nation’s most prominent companies yet, many major regional theaters are recognizing the importance of the Hispanic audience. Still, Latino playwrights are a bit suspicious of the new embrace of legitimacy, and are reacting cautiously, wanting to avoid becoming token minorities in the still overwhelmingly white theater world.

The H.L. Mencken Of The Opera World

Sir Jonathan Miller may be English opera’s greatest curmudgeon, and at 70, he clearly doesn’t feel that he has a lot to lose by criticizing his colleagues in the industry. With only a bit of prodding, Miller reveals that, in his view, Joe Volpe is little better than a Jersey mob boss, critics are “midgets talking into a loudspeaker,” and the well-heeled opera fans who crowd Covent Garden on a weekly basis are “chalk-striped aubergines” who don’t know the first thing about great art. Miller can afford to say these things, apparently, because he believes that he will never again work in opera.

Who Needs Schools When We Have Peter Gabriel?

Say what you want about the superiority of classical music or the complex intricacies of jazz, but according to novelist Dave Eggers, there’s simply nothing like good old-fashioned American pop music to get the creative juices flowing and make you smarter. “Like many citizens, I think a regular regimen of intense listening to the more literary or even pretentious songwriters should replace standard education… Music-as-learning-tool combines the three most potent sources of persuasion: a trusted voice, sublimity and endless repetition.”

Nothing Attracts People To The Arts Like Fistfights & Incest

The BBC has snapped up the rights to a TV broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera, and will air the satirical look at America’s most over-the-top talk show host in January. A spokeswoman “said it was part of the BBC’s strategy to introduce a new generation of viewers to opera. The BBC have also commissioned six comedy operas from the makers of the hit West End show.”

Canada’s New Top Arts Advocate

The new national director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Conference of the Arts brings a unique profile and a long resume to the job. Jean Malavoy “comes to the CCA after a three-year stint as the executive director of La Nouvelle Scène, an umbrella theatre centre for four francophone troupes in Ottawa… He also has a certificate in marketing the performing arts from the École des hautes études commerciales de Montréal. In short, he knows both the bureaucratic/fiscal and the administrative/creative sides of the cultural ledger.” His main mission at the helm of the CCA will be to convince the precarious Martin government not to cut the arts for political gain.