Producers of Broadway’s “Gypsy” have decided to close the show. “Starring Bernadette Peters as the hard-driving stage mother Momma Rose, “Gypsy” posted a closing notice in early February, only to extend its run after sales improved. Part of that improvement might have been linked to warmer weather and heightened tourism, but cast members had also taken an active role in promoting the show with daily personal appearances outside TKTS, the half-price ticket booth, in Duffy Square.”
Tag: 04.22.04
LA – Land Of Small Theatres
Los Angeles is a hive of “almost 100 self-sustaining, not-for-profit, professional theater ensembles.” It’s a theatre community quite unlike that anywhere else, a decidedly un-New York. “These largely volunteer (often dues-based) organizations are quasi families — which are sometimes authoritarian, sometimes collaborative, sometimes bickering, often leaving, just as often returning — homes to thousands of actors lured by and often working in Hollywood while sustaining a legit-stage subculture.”
Going For Economic Diveristy In School?
The top American universities are now more than ever filled with children of the wealthy. “Experts say the change in the student population is a result of both steep tuition increases and the phenomenal efforts many wealthy parents put into preparing their children to apply to the best schools.” Now some schools are trying to diversify the economic makeup of their students.
Killing The iPod – Try The Celestial Jukebox
“By using licenses, the labels and their download sites are secretly transforming music into a service—something to which you subscribe, and about which they can change the rules any time they want. But it’s a particularly crappy service. Who wants to ‘own’ this sort of pseudo-property, these annoying, stubborn, mulelike music files? In contrast, a music-streaming site advertises itself as a service, with an entirely different sort of consumer logic and much more satisfying results.”
But Dahhhh-ling, Say It Isn’t So
Workers at a UK opera company have been banned from using the theatrical greeting ‘darling’. The English National Opera confirmed they had issued staff new guidelines on using the term of endearment. They fear use of the word ‘darling’ could constitute sexual harassment in the workplace.”
Will Pittsburgh Tour Without A Music Director?
According to a German company which specializes in booking American orchestras into European venues, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is planning two major tours of the continent in 2005 and 2006, despite not having a music director. The plans call for Hans Graf to conduct the PSO on the first tour, with Andrew Davis leading the way in late summer 2006. It is highly unusual for an American orchestra to tour without its music director, but the PSO may be attempting to take advantage of the worldwide reputation it earned under departing MD Mariss Jansons as one of the U.S.’s best, if not best-known, ensembles.
Cannes’s New Look
“Comedies, documentaries, animated features and genre films join the usual art-house fare in this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, which has undergone a substantial overhaul following numerous complaints that last year’s selection was one of the worst in the festival’s history. After three years in the understudy role, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux is completely in charge of the festival for the first time this year and he seems determined to shake off Cannes’s cobwebs, along with its reputation as a self-congratulatory club for a handful of admired but little-watched veteran directors surrounded by photo opportunities for many famous movie stars.”
Whatever Happened to the Political Novel?
Is the socially conscious novel a dead genre? Whatever happened to the idea that a book can change the world? Are authors so intent on their own characters that they can’t be bothered to make their plots politically relevant to our increasingly dangerous world? Ray Conlogue is only asking, but modern authors seem increasingly hostile to the notion that they could actually advance political ideas or social agendas with their works of fiction. These days, novelists are perfectly within their rights to spend hours working on behalf of whatever causes they support, but to put the crusade to paper would apparently cross some invisible line of decorum.
Should FCC Be Allowed To Police Cable?
FCC Chairman Michael Powell is hoping that he can convince Congress to give his commission authority over cable TV networks, as part of an ongoing effort to wipe everything that Powell finds indecent or obscene from the national media landscape. At the moment, the FCC has no power over cable, since such networks do not use the public airwaves and are a subscription-based service available only to those viewers who choose to pay for it. Joanne Ostrow finds Powell’s attempted power-grab alarming: “An activist FCC must not trample the free-speech provisions of the Constitution, even if Powell thinks he is a hero, saving America from itself.”
The Art Of The Expat
“The histories of American writers and composers who went to Paris between the world wars have been examined so frequently that it’s almost unthinkable the same should not have been true for artists. But [a] new exhibition at the Terra Museum of American Art, purports to be the first to examine the phenomenon in all its diversity, and that has made for a complex, often revelatory experience.” American artists drawn to Paris for its comparatively eclectic style and freedom of artistic thought “defined themselves by looking to currents outside their native country even after they returned home, as nearly all of them did.”