The fall season on Broadway is a crowded one. And advance box office is looking good too…
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The Blues – Now For The Facts
The Martin Scorcese blues documentary project currently running on PBS is a riff on the music, but short on the basic facts. So a radio series that looks at the blues from a more clinical chronological perspective was put together. “The film teams knew that once the films aired there would be an outcry because they’re not traditional documentary. There was a feeling that there was a need for that kind of content. So the folks who put the project together – Scorsese and the Seattle-based Experience Music Project – settled into a 13-part documentary that would be a true chronological documentary on what is the blues.”
Remembering Vladimir Horowitz
In the last three years of pianist Vladimir Horowitz’s life, he was forever being labeled the last Romantic virtuoso. “As a younger generation of cooler-headed, more intellectual pianists came to the fore, Horowitz came to be regarded as a lovable dinosaur. The truth, as demonstrated by an outpouring of Horowitz films and CD’s re-released in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, is that he was that rare artist who sums up nothing but himself.”
NY Film Festival – A Dumping Ground?
“Do not believe overpaid actors who cry poor mouth. Overstuffed programs in Venice, Montreal and Toronto have recently proved there is no such thing as a faltering economy in the movie business. Hundreds of new films are upon us like carrion birds, but why do the ones nobody will ever see again (or want to) reliably turn up in the New York Film Festival, and why are they always so lousy?”
Three More Architecture Stars For The WTC Project
The World Trade Center site project is becoming some kind of Hall of Fame for architects. Now Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, and Jean Nouvel have been recruited to design towers ringing the memorial site planned for the southwest corner of the new World Trade Center. Already working on the project are Daniel Libeskind and Santiago Calatrava, who is working for the Port Authority to develop a transit hub on the site.
Moscow Film Fest Canceled – Is Censorship On The Rise?
A film festival in Moscow showing movies “highlighting massacres allegedly committed by Russian troops in Chechnya” is canceled just before it was to start, as cinema organizers say that films that were to be shown are too political. The cancelation feeds fears that censorship is on the rise in Russia. “With [former president Boris] Yeltsin, we didn’t have this. There was corruption and social disorder, the same as now, but at least nobody was afraid to tell the truth.”
Coetzee Awarded Nobel
“South African writer J.M. Coetzee, whose stories set against the backdrop of apartheid tell of innocents and outcasts dwarfed by history, won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy said Thursday.”
Nobel Literature Winners Since 1960
A list…
Royal Shakespeare Looks To London Again
In a reversal of policy, the Royal Shakespeare Company says it is looking for a permanent home in London. Last year the RSC gave up its digs at the Barbican. “It currently has an itinerant status in the capital, moving from venue to venue. This has reportedly hit box office receipts and, say critics, caused the company to lose its identity.”
Bellevue Art Museum Post Mortem
Seattle arts groups are struggling. But it was still a surprise when the Bellevue Art Museum abruptly closed the doors of its new buildin. “Last week, the Bellevue Art Museum made the stunning announcement that it was closing its doors through at least the end of this year, only two and a half years after opening a $23 million, 36,000-square-foot Steven Holl-designed facility intended to be downtown Bellevue’s cultural anchor.”