Broadway musicians are getting ready to negotiate for a new contract. The musicians’ union says the negotiation will be about whether theatres continue to use live musicians. “They have made direct statements to me that they are or will be prepared to replace us with mechanical devices. They’re going to walk in with a proposal to eliminate minimums, and behind it will be the threat to replace us should we go on strike.”
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Dreaming Of A New Lincoln Center
New York’s Lincoln Center is planning a renovation/expansion. What should the new campus achieve? “The goal is still to expose the American citizen to art and music, but the emphasis has changed. Arts institutions no longer see themselves as beneficent agents of acculturation and middle-class homogenization. Instead, they are scrambling to adapt to a crowded entertainment market and recast themselves as democratic, youthful, relevant and diverse. As Lincoln Center rebuilds, its planners are searching for ways to open it up, make it more visible, transparent and permeable.”
Ideas That Exceed Our Abilities
“Sometime in the next 20 or 30 years, we’re going to have, because of Moore’s law, machines that will have the computational power and memory of humans.” Even now, many of today’s new engineering achievements are so complex, they can’t really be designed by people – they’re invented by sophisticated computers that exceed our own abilities. “But we don’t know how to program them yet to interact naturally with people. So it’s all a software problem.”
National Theatre Slashes Ticket Prices
Nicholas Hytner, incoming director of London’s National Theatre has plans to slash ticket prices – to £10 tickets for many of the large productions. “What I want to do is find a way of getting people in to try what we have got to offer, the same way you feel able to try a movie at the weekend even if you do not know much about it.”
A Bold Start
“Hytner’s first season is full of bold thinking. The news that in the biggest of the NT’s three auditoria, the Olivier, two thirds of the ticket prices will be slashed to £10 for six months couldn’t be more welcome. It should attract new audiences, and also let people who already attend do so more often. The theatre will be stripped back to basics, and offer “accessible”, no-frills productions in this epic ampitheatre space.”
The Theatre Fanatic Sisters
The Dalton Sisters are dedicated theatre-goers. They go over and over to the same shows, and even cut back on lunch so they can afford tickets. “Their favourite show by far is ‘Les Miserables’. The Dalton sisters have seen Les Mis more than 500 times. They’ve travelled overseas and interstate to see it, paying $60,000 for the pleasure, watch every performance intently, know all the lines, and notice if they’re delivered differently. Joanne still cries at every session.” A fascinated documentary-maker has made a film of their obsession…
Bill Viola – Careful Screening
“It’s been a long journey for Bill Viola, from the small fringe world of video art in the early 1970s to his current position as one of the most highly regarded artists working in any medium, but his odyssey has always been closely tied to the cutting edge of technology.”
Opera In Your Living Room
“Ask the man on the street to define opera and you’re likely to get adjectives like grand, foreign, expensive. Ask a New York opera patron about opera beyond the Metropolitan and City Operas, and you might get a mention of the Amato Opera, the stalwart 107-seat theater on the Bowery that’s been putting on tiny productions of classic operas since 1948. But none of these quite covers the broad spectrum of indie opera companies that produce fully staged opera around New York City in living rooms, church basements and city parks.”
Italy To Return Parthenon Fragment
Italy will return a fragment of the Parthenon to Greece as a “gesture of goodwill”. “The fragment is part of the statue of Peitho, the daughter of Mercury and Venus, which once adorned the eastern side of the Parthenon. A 14-by-13.6- inch piece of marble, it depicts the goddess’s foot and a portion of her tunic. The frieze was regularly purchased by the museum between 1818 and 1820 from the widow of Robert Fagan, the British consul for Sicily and Malta” and has nothing to do with the Elgin Marbles.
Kennedy Center Makes Plans
Washington’s Kennedy Center has approved a $650 million plan for a “four-block plaza, to be built over existing roadways and flanked by the new glass-and-steel buildings, one housing rehearsal and office space and the other for an educational center and interactive exhibits on the performing arts. ‘It puts us in reality where we were supposed to be all along, as a monument in Washington’.”