“Director-choreographer Twyla Tharp’s surreal spectacle set to Bob Dylan songs is now somewhere between Draft 2 and the final Draft 3 that will open on Broadway this fall. Those terms come from Tharp herself, who calls a private workshop performance of the fledgling show last year in New York “Draft 1” and the Globe show of two months ago “Draft 2.” In residence here since early December, the workaholic Tharp has attended most of the 65 performances since previews began.”
Tag: 03.19.06
Toledo, Detroit Museums Go To Court Over Gauguin And Van Gogh Paintings
The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Toledo Museum are in court to settle ownership issues surrounding a van Gogh and a Gauguin. “At stake is whether the pictures will remain in the museums’ collections or whether the museums must return the works to the heirs or pay restitution. The paintings are worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million apiece in today’s art market, based on auction records.”
Missouri Has Sunk To The Bottom In Arts Funding
“Its current budget of $485,000 places it in the bottom six of 56 states, territories and protectorates. The others are Montana ($406,356), the Virgin Islands ($309,568), Guam ($266,577), Northern Marianas ($260,000) and American Samoa ($44,000).”
Schwarzenegger Proposes Big Arts Ed Increase
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006-2007 budget for California proposes $100 million to enhance and expand arts education throughout California’s K-8 schools. The plan is to apportion these funds to local school districts using a formula based on their enrollment levels…
New Opera – A Future On Which To Build?
“Conventional wisdom holds that no one writes good operas anymore — not, at least, operas that anyone wants to hear. Yet in the United States, this view is yielding to the idea among presenters that new American opera — pieces by American composers based on American stories — may be the future of a field fighting the perception that it is static, Eurocentric and outdated.”
Castrati – Freakish Phenoms?
“The castrati – or evirati, as they were politely called – are perhaps the most freakish phenomenon in Western musical history. Eunuchs had been a common feature of the courts of the Islamic world long before they appeared in 17th-century Italy, which seems to be the only Western country where castration was widely performed – the operation was illegal, but parents of the victims just mumbled about unfortunate encounters with wild boars, and prosecutions were rare.”
Convention: A Narrowing Of Orchestral Repertoire
“A certain culture has grown around the presentation of orchestral music. Because something in the programme requires the full might of a symphony orchestra, it has tended to dictate the scale of everything else on the programme. Because of the inherent and intrinsic tendency of symphony orchestras to programme concerts featuring pretty exclusively their total playing resources, the repertoire (and audiences) have, over a very long stretch of time, been thus starved of seriously interesting music that requires fewer musicians to perform, and has therefore become sidelined and neglected.”
What Are Museums For, Anyway?
“To those of us reared on the fogeyish assumption that a museum’s collection is sacrosanct – that the British Museum will always have its Elgin Marbles and the Pitt Rivers its shrunken tribal heads – the idea of ancient vases being mauled and chipped by mobs of primary schoolchildren or Roman coin hoards being flogged off to fund the acquisition of a more socially relevant collection of graffiti art is indeed a pretty shocking one. But for the new breed of museum professional, this line of thinking is very much the fashionable orthodoxy.”
Can Kevin Spacey Turn Around The Old Vic?
Kevin Spacey is dealing with another play at the Old Vic getting a critical drubbing. Spacey’s trying to make the theatre work. But it’s an uphill battle…
Da Vinci Plagiarism Case In Final Arguments
Summing up the plaintiffs’ case of plagiarism against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Jonathan Rayner James QC sounds more like a man complaining about a verdict he knows is coming than someone marshalling evidence. He said Brown had been “unco-operative” in court. “He had almost no recollection of matters that related to issues of timing.”