Have we lost our critical distance from the cultural things with which we interact? “American culture as a whole has grown increasingly spellbound by electronic media to the point where now every other person we see wears a headset, has a cell phone to one ear or eyes fixed on some porthole of cyberspace. The critical distance that once appeared to be a virtue, or at least an advantage, now appears to be one more illusion, or perhaps a mere spasm of arrogance on the artist’s or the critic’s part.”
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The Big One That Left (And The Little Ones That Took Its Place)
It’s been awhile since Cleveland San Jose Ballet left Cleveland for the West Coast. “No large-scale classical company has risen from the ashes of the former Cleveland San Jose Ballet. Instead, more than a dozen small ensembles are keeping dance alive.”
Inspired By The Silver Screen
Broadway had a healthy year at the box office this season. But more and more it seems, theatre is looking for its inspiration from the movies. “Despite these flashes of risk-taking creativity, the looming presence on Broadway this season has been the movie-musical and the musical revival. In the former genre, the year’s biggest smoking craters were left by such derided bombs as Dance of the Vampire and Urban Cowboy. But when producers turn their envious eyes to the grosses from Hairspray, the exuberant version of the John Waters cult film and a heavy favorite tonight, they still want to take a chance and get into the picture.”
Should Politics Be Like Reality TV?
Is voting someone out of the Big Brother reality TV house much different from voting out politicians? “Television has always been a problem for politicians, but never more so than now, when it is questioning their very ethos and raison d’être. Politics is going through the biggest change since the emancipation of women. It is massive, what could happen in the next five to 10 years, in the meshing of direct and representative democracy. It is something new. Television has picked up on interactivity in the telecommunications world. That is driving it.”
How Did TV Lose Its Promise?
“Television is no longer an experience we share with the neighbours, except on such dire occasions. When we gather to drink and mourn and shout idiotically at the screen, it is part of a wider life. At other times in public places, it is merely part of the furniture, a familiar but unobserved accessory, while in the home it has become a utility as plentiful as tap water. All this seems a long way from a working-class Stirlingshire village in June 1953, when there was a sense that the box of tricks had been invented for the purpose of giving ordinary people an access to extraordinary events.”
Edinburgh Fringe: We Have To Get Bigger Or Bust
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with a 22-day calendar and 1,541 acts, staged in a record 207 venues, is the largest performing arts festival in the world. But in “unveiling the 2003 Fringe programme, Fringe director Paul Gudgin warns that, without future growth, ‘the law of diminishing returns will kick in’ and the quality and reputation of the Fringe would be undermined.”
500 Channels And Nothing To Watch
It wasn’t that long ago that there was genuine excitement about the coming 500-channel TV landscape. So how come now that we have it there doesn’t ever seem to be anything on? “The truth is, as the networks become ever smaller pieces of ever-growing media empires, there is dwindling potential for the kind of risk-taking that gave us breakout programming such as All In The Family or Seinfeld. Imagine some boardroom type green-lighting a comedy about a bigoted, racist right-winger or “a show about nothing.”
Sorting Out Winners And Losers In NY Phil Move To Carnegie
John Rockwell writes that Carnegie Hall gives up something important by becoming home to the New York Philharmonic. “At Lincoln Center, meanwhile, the immediate impression might be that the rats are scurrying down the hawser, fleeing a sinking ship. The New York City Opera is making noises about abandoning the center for a Ground Zero cultural center not yet designed, let alone built. The Philharmonic is on its way out. Who’s next? What is to become of the grand late-50’s and early-60’s dream of a cultural center that would bring everyone together, a dream that spawned imitators all over the world? Not much bad, say I, and maybe something good. The urban-renewal aspect of the Lincoln Center project has long been fulfilled.”
The HipHop Musical – Reinventing Musical Theatre?
So far, hip-hop theater’s most distinctive, exciting quality is ‘how’ — the way in which its stories are told. In the brightest moments of ‘Flow,’ Will Power shows that hip-hop’s fusion of verse and song could make it a potent update of the traditional ‘Oklahoma!’-style musical, one better suited to the stage than rock music. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, who proved that even a carnival barker can sing a musical soliloquy, his work suggests that hip-hop’s narrative tools will function well beyond one generation’s concerns.” Maybe hiphop musicals operate more like opera, “with one critical exception. ‘Right now there are no conventions, the way opera is full of well-understood, time-honored conventions. It’s evolving now.”
How To Make Sense Of The NY Phil Move To Carnegie?
Anthony Tommasini wonders what’s in it for Carnegie Hall in bringing over the New York Philharmonic from Lincoln Center. “To make sense, this move must be seized by the Philharmonic as a chance not just to enhance its aural impact but to jolt its artistic metabolism. For Lincoln Center, meanwhile, this decision is more than a disruption. It’s a disastrous setback, no matter how much administrators try to spin it as an opportunity for new ventures.”