Rosie O’Donnell has always been one of Broadway’s biggest boosters. Now she’s putting her own money behind her words. “Taboo,” a new musical with songs by the 1980’s pop star Boy George, is being backed by O’Donnell, who is putting up $10 million of her fortune to produce it. “While that alone would make her involvement remarkable — most shows on Broadway get their money from dozens of smaller investors — Ms. O’Donnell has also taken the risky step of casting herself as the principal draw for ‘Taboo,’ using her brassy image and her reputation as an arbiter of suburban taste to lure audiences.”
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TV’s New Man – Cad Or Dad
TV’s ability to stereotype is an awesome thing. “Women on television are still sometimes squeezed into demeaning caricatures (or at least inappropriate clothing: surgeons, homicide detectives and high school teachers all wear low-cut tank tops to work). But increasingly, so are men. The new fall season shrinks the number of belittling stereotypes they may occupy to just two: cads or dads.”
Edward Albee’s Third Act
“Ever since Jerry cornered Peter on a Central Park bench in “The Zoo Story” and demanded an audience, Albee has served as ‘an invaluable irritant to the status quo.’ With ‘The Zoo Story’ hitting off-Broadway in 1959 and, three years later, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ on Broadway, the American establishment had an unnerving new commentator wielding a venomously witty pen. Albee was in, or It, for a good while. Then, by the late 1970s, Albee was out. Since the success of “Three Tall Women” a decade ago, he has been in again.”
Group Think
America’s performing arts service organizations are planning their first-ever joint meeting. “At the First National Performing Arts Convention, to be held in Pittsburgh June 8-13, groups such as OPERA America, Theatre Communications Group, Dance/USA, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre will hold their own meetings and also gather together to address topics including arts research, audience development, arts education, governance and ethics, arts journalism and new-work development.”
Wanted: An Arts Mayor For Toronto
Toronto is electing a new mayor, and the five major candidates for the office gathered to talk about the arts. “The first Great Toronto Arts Debate was refreshingly free of all that embarrassing ‘world-class city’ rhetoric that has marked civic politics since the eighties.” And there was acknowledgment that the arts were important for the city’s future. But what does that mean, exactly?
How Denver Got Major Theatre
“In its 24 years and 255 productions, the Denver Center Theatre Company has grown from a civic curiosity in a ghostly part of downtown into the largest regional theater between Chicago and the West Coast. In 1998, it received the Tony Award as the best regional company in the nation.”
The Selling Of (New) Money
The US is about to introduce a new $20 bill. To acquaint the public with the new-look money, the government is spending “$33 million on advertising, marketing and education programs to promote the new bill, and it has hired a public relations firm and, in a first, a product placement firm and one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies to put the $20 bill on the publicity circuit. By the time the new bill joins the currency flow next month, it will have appeared virtually everywhere but on the ballot for California’s recall election.”
Kushner: Of Art And Politics
Playwright Tony Kushner on the responsibility of artists in challenging time: “You can’t find any important work of American art, in theater or anywhere else, that doesn’t have a very powerful political dimension. [But] whatever you do with your day job—and writing plays is what I do—is no replacement for activism, which is a necessary part of being a citizen in a democracy.”
The Red/Blue Divide Takes Center Stage
As America’s political divide grows ever wider, with the right wing in control of the government and the left settling into its familiar role as vocal minority, the theater world is struggling with the question of how to engage its audience on a political level. Behind the scenes, many theaters have had to get conservative, slashing expenses in the face of a crippling recession and the decreasing governmental commitment to the arts. “But as the nation and the state have shifted rightward on the political spectrum, local theater people with progressive political agendas are coming off the sidelines and putting their beliefs on the stage.”
Philadelphia Looks To Shore Up The Future
The Philadelphia Orchestra is indisputably one of the world’s great musical ensembles. But behind the scenes, the much-admired Philadelphia Sound has often been eclipsed by a perception that the orchestra is perpetually mismanaged on the financial side. Its fund-raising machine has always lagged far behind those of other “Big 5” orchestras, and in fact, Philadelphia’s endowment is more comparable to those of second-tier orchestras in Minneapolis and Washington than it is to its peers in New York and Boston. This year, the Philadelphians have announced plans to change all that, with a massive endowment drive off to an impressive start. Peter Dobrin has heard this type of boast before, but the early results show that Philly may finally have its eye on the ball.