Category: today’s top story

“Citing mounting debts and lackluster revenues, the Honolulu Symphony said it will file for bankruptcy protection and may lay off half of its musicians. … [The orchestra] will cancel all of its November and December concerts and made no guarantees that the rest of its 2009-10 season would go on.”

“The chairman of the Honolulu Symphony’s board of directors [said] that as of last Friday, the symphony did not have enough money to make its payroll. … He refused to confirm whether the orchestra will file for bankruptcy or postpone part of its season. The symphony has already put off two concerts this weekend.”

An “astounding new show” at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum “makes it indisputable: Nowhere in the Boston area is it possible to get, in one gulp, a comparable sense of the excitement engendered by European and especially American modernism.” If that had been better known, might the Rose’s troubles have been avoided?

Alessandra Stanley: “Forty years on, this is your mother’s Sesame Street, only better dressed and gentrified: … The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.”

“Yesterday Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire … celebrated the £90 million acquisition that makes their company the largest British theatre operator since the variety era, dwarfing Lord Lloyd-Webber and Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s rival empires.” Their takeover of Live Nation’s theatres “could have distinct consequences for theatregoers, particularly in the regions.”

The veteran conductor, currently music director of the Detroit Symphony, experienced chest pains while leading the Rotterdam Philharmonic on Sunday and collapsed in his dressing room afterwards. He is now recovering in a Dutch hospital following an emergency angioplasty.

“Ralph Miller says he had his Pocono Playhouse reappraised and its insurance bumped up to $1.25 million for refinancing purposes about six months before fire destroyed the theater. … Fires deemed to be arson destroyed Miller’s Woodstock Playhouse in New York state in 1988 and the Falmouth Playhouse in Cape Cod, Mass., in 1994.”

“For decades, the trinity of quick, cheap, and ugly dominated the city’s building program. Quick was always a chimera, and cheap remains sacrosanct, but ugly won’t cut it anymore.”

So far, e-readers mostly provide “static reproductions of the print version,” minus the advantages of hard-copy books that readers have grown accustomed to over the years, such as easily being able to pass a book on to a friend,

“There was inevitably a lot of great dance and dancing. But also, inevitably, this was not exactly a dance occasion. … Nor, for that matter was it about Merce (yes, everyone called him and calls him Merce). What distinguished Cunningham from all other great choreographers was the degree of his inclusiveness.”