The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre says it is giving up Shakespeare, Ibsn and other classics. “The 42-year-old regional theatre company, the largest in Western Canada, announced a dramatic change in mandate yesterday. As of next season, the Playhouse will only produce contemporary plays written after 1950. ‘This is an evolution, not a revolution’.”
Tag: 03.20.04
The Latest Casualties In The Obscenity Wars
A pair of Atlanta radio DJs were suspended Friday shortly after they broadcast sexually explicit talk with a porn star. The two had planned to record the explicit conversation and play it backwards over the air.
Feckless At The Royal Academy
“Nowadays London’s Royal Academy, for all its clever rebranding as friend to the Hirst generation, is a silly place: its summer show a trite exercise, its courting of the rich and famous (the newly restored rooms at its home, Burlington House, have been named after the man who gave the most money) a little crass, its style always tending to the posh and the phony. Yet the opening display from its art collection in the Fine Rooms is a powerful reminder that the Royal Academy once mattered, that it was once revolutionary.”
Of Fairness And Discrimination
“A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.”
Mr. Perlman Takes The NY Phil
Itzhak Perlman makes his debut as conductor with the New York Philharmonic. “There are a few things to be said for Mr. Perlman as a conductor. Whatever the flaws in his conducting technique, his inherent musicality goes a long way in communicating what he wants. Clearly he is not doing this half-heartedly, as some soloists have.”
Indie Record Stores: Downloading Helping Our Business
Conventional wisdom has it that music downloading has damaged the recording business. But some independent record stores are “finding that file sharing can help create a buzz online that can lead to more sales, according to a panel of independent music store owners who spoke at the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival here Friday.”
Arts Education Feels The Budget Squeeze
As state governments in America find their budgets squeezed, money for education is being cut. And educators, looking for places to cut, are choosing to kill arts education. In California, “music enrollment statewide is at a 20-year low, according to the latest statistics. From a high of 1.1 million students in the 1999-2000 school year, music participation plummeted to 624,516 students last year. The trend is disturbing to music teachers and others now that more is known about how the arts benefit academics.”
SF Museum Garage Construction Halted By Judge
A San Francisco judge has halted construction of a parking garage in front of the de Young Museum, saying that the way the garage is being financed is not allowed. Delay in construction will cost the museum millions. “The de Young museum’s summer 2005 reopening will be delayed until the garage is built, because a big hole will be created in front of the museum as the garage is being constructed. Museum officials now expect to open the facility next September — three months late — which means $3.8 million in lost revenue and added expenses,
How The Arts Convinced Florida To Give It Money
A year after Florida chopped its arts funding, how did Florida arts lovers get its legislature to approve 115-2 to restore $21 million a year in new funding? The old fashioned way – lobbying. “Before the first committee meeting of this legislative year, arts groups began flooding legislative offices with 200,000 multicolored protest cards, just one of the strategies dreamed up in weekly conference calls that organizers held with arts groups in each of the state’s 67 counties.”