“Since the dawn of European music, Italy has been its chief wellspring of melody and imagination. Johann Sebastian Bach learned his craft copying out concertos by Vivaldi and claiming them as his own. Mozart wrote his operas to Italian texts by Varesco, Calzabigi and da Ponte. But the recent death of Luciano Berio leaves Italy without a single composer of world renown – indeed, without one composer whose name might elicit a flicker of ragazzi recognition in any town piazza from Milan to Palermo. Italy has become overnight a land without music, a calamity of uncalculated cultural magnitude.”
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Print Your Own Tickets
Buy your tickets online and print them out on your own printer. It’s happening in Australia. “The Lion King will be the first major theatre production in Australia to use direct printing from the internet to make tickets available to patrons. Taking the pain out of queueing at the box office and dramas over lost or mislaid tickets, customers will be emailed a file with their ticket and other information on the show, with a $3 saving on the booking fee.”
Indy Bookstore Declines Harry
The last time a new Harry Potter book came out, an independent bookstore in Toronto got the jump on the sale date and began selling it early. That led to recriminations from the publisher, the lawyers got involved, and … tens of thousands of dollars and a few years later, the publisher wants to know if the bookstore wants a piece of the new Harry. Not a chance, says the bookstore owner. “The whole thing was totally ridiculous. You put an embargo on Saddam Hussein, not on children’s books.”
New Theatre – Give ‘Em What They Want
“Something like a dozen innovative Seattle theater groups are grabbing younger audiences – people under 40 who pretty much elude the established stage institutions. Youth-friendly companies pattern their content and their style on TV, our No. 1 baby sitter, our low-cost mood-altering drug. The resultant shows are episodic. They are funny. They use a lot of music. They are sexy. They feature characters and situations with which under-40s can identify. Brandon Jepson performs for a Jet City Improv crowd. The bulk of Jet City audiences are between 16 and 25. And they are satirical. Using ridicule as a demolition ball, they whack away at anxiety-causing people, situations and organizations.”
Broadway: How Do You Define Success?
So this year’s Tony Awards broadcast was entertaining… the rating didn’t improve. “Despite the general impression inside the industry that the television broadcast was handled well and even ? gasp! ? entertaining at times, the Nielsen ratings didn’t improve. About eight million people watched the Tonys last year; about eight million people watched the Tonys this year. Is that surprising? More important, is it depressing? In the end, no. Some 11.4 million tickets to Broadway shows were sold last year, a number that has held roughly the same for several years.”
Lincoln Center Construction Boss Quits
The chairman of Lincoln Center’s redevelopment project has resigned, calling the project “wasteful and badly managed.” The resignation is another blow to the troubled performing arts complex, which saw the New York Philharmonic announce it was leaving two weeks ago. Peter Lehrer said as he resigned Lincoln Center: “A lot of money has been spent on planning with not enough to show for it.”
Broadway’s Tricky Season
Ah yes, Broadway ended up having a big-selling season at the box office. But for producers, navigating the minefield of situations that came up this year required some extra risk-taking. “New York theater has had a troubled winter. Bad weather, a Broadway strike, the war in Iraq, and an uncertain economy have made for dicey times for an industry still trying to figure out what the new normal is since 9/11 knocked it for a loop.”
Oakland Mayor Backs Off Artist Evictions
“Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown has dropped plans to evict artists from the popular downtown Alice Arts Center to make room for the expansion of his arts charter school.” The artists had been protesting the possible eviction. The center served 50,000 people a year through classes and performances.
The Greatest, Whatever, Uh-huh
What is it with critics pronouncing this or that artist the “greatest” of a generation? Laziness, that’s what, writes Peter Plagens. “A critic’s pronouncing somebody ‘the greatest/most-important sculptor/bassoonist/director/novelist/cheesemaker/whatever of his generation’ says much more about the critic than the anointed artist. It says that the critic has reached a state of fatigue and impatience with taking forward-looking, right-now judgmental chances on quirky 25-year-olds who probably won’t pan out over the long haul, making the critic look misguided. It says that the critic is more comfortable looking backward. It says the critic has reached a plateau of self-importance on which he wants to go around conferring cultural knighthoods on artist-commoners who’ve managed to rise above their making-clever-baubles-for-the-rich stations to become, almost, big thinkers. And it says that the critic wants to get the authoritative-sounding but actually sonorously empty words ‘greatest’ and ‘generation’ together in the same sentence.”
Broad Donates Money For New Contemporary Art Museum
Philanthropist Eli Broad has agreed to fund a new building for contemporary art for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “In a memorandum of understanding with museum leaders, Broad has laid out plans to pay for ‘every penny’ of a new, 70,000-square-foot building, said LACMA board Chairman Wally Weisman. The new building, tentatively dubbed the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA and projected to cost roughly $50 million, would stand along Wilshire Boulevard just east of the former May Co. building now known as LACMA West.”