“Why aren’t our finest regional [theatre] companies as well known as, say, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Orchestra? Ask any publicist and the first thing you’ll hear is that the media don’t take regional theater seriously. Each year it grows more difficult to persuade the arts editors of major newspapers and magazines — even those that pay fairly close attention to theater in New York — to send their drama critics to other cities, save for an occasional trip to London. As for TV, forget about it. I can’t remember the last time PBS aired an out-of-town production. Regional theater, it seems, just isn’t glamorous enough to make the journalistic cut.”
Tag: 06.24.06
Why Jazz Doesn’t Always Sound Good In Great Concert Halls
Carnegie Hall is, of course, one of the world’s great concert halls, just so long as you’re talking about symphonic music. But throw the best jazz band in the world on the Carnegie main stage, and you’ve got a major acoustical problem on your hands. The problem has to do with electronics – halls built to showcase the raw sound of an orchestra just aren’t built to deal with the high-octane amplification systems used by jazz and pop musicians. The problem can be overcome without too much trouble if the guy running the sound board knows how to do it, but a large percentage of board operators just aren’t used to working in such an environment.
Emmy Looks To Broaden Its Horizons
“The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the overseer of the annual Emmy Awards for prime-time television, has revamped its procedures in an attempt to spread the wealth of Emmy nominations — if not the actual awards — to a broader array of actors, actresses and shows. That could result in some overlooked and new titles making the list of nominees in the top Emmy categories for the first time when this year’s nominations are announced on July 6.”
Guthrie’s Gamble
As Minneapolis’s huge new Guthrie Theater opens for business this weekend, there’s no question that the company has succeeded in building serious national buzz about its new home. But some observers wonder whether local audiences used to the old Guthrie’s intimate surroundings will be put off by the grand scale of the new complex. And it’s not as if theatregoers don’t have other choices. “Guthrie’s challenge in 1963 was to educate a market with only one Equity house, a few short-lived professional companies and a dozen community theaters. [Today, the company] is facing a mature — some would argue saturated — market in which he hopes to sell 140,000 more tickets each year.”
Oh, Georgia, You Just Make It Too Easy Sometimes…
A suburban Atlanta library system has a new policy that is angering Georgia’s large immigrant community: the library will not buy any new books in Spanish, starting now. The county library board had previously set aside $3000 per year for the purchase of Spanish-language material, but the subsidy was eliminated “after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants.”
We’re Banning Reference Books Now?
A North Carolina school district has banned the much-lauded Cassell Dictionary of Slang, claiming that the book, which includes some 87,000 entries, is somehow inappropriate for children. Not surprisingly, the impetus for the ban came from a Christian fundamentalist group, which is also seeking to ban many other books, including Maurice Sendak’s “Mickey In The Night Kitchen” and Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War.”
Mass Distraction
The Information Age was supposed to provide humanity with access to endless streams of information, carefully organized and readily available to anyone with a computer and a bit of know-how. But how are you supposed to take advantage of such bountiful excess when you’re forced to deal with a constant stream of pop-up ads you can’t get rid of, “informational” e-mails you didn’t ask for, and other newfangled distractions? It’s a serious matter, according to researchers who have been studying worker productivity, and the unceasing interruptions are having a profound impact on our ability to concentrate on the tasks at hand.
The Morals Clause
What do we do when the greatness of an artist’s work clashes with a serious flaw in his/her character? For years, the debate has raged around the music of Richard Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite whose music became, for a time, synonymous with the Third Reich. But what about the British composer Benjamin Britten, who has been known for decades to have been something close to a pedophile? Should this fact affect the way we listen to his music? Should we listen to it at all? The answers aren’t easy…
Is The Russian-Fuelled Art Boom Due For A Fall?
There’s no longer any doubt that Russian collectors have been fuelling a major art boom on both sides of the Atlantic. But how long can this particular bubble last? “The last time the market hit such heights was at the end of the 1980s, followed by a crash that saw New York’s SoHo, then the city’s main gallery district, end up a ghost town… According to current wisdom, this boom is safer because the new globalised market means more stability. The last boom was all about one economy, Japan’s, so it was snuffed out when that economy collapsed. But the new markets could be as yet too new and shallow to rely on.”
Art You Can See, Taste, Hear, And Smell
Wassily Kandinsky may have had more than just paint in mind when he crafted his masterpieces. “Music – and the idea of music – appears everywhere in Kandinsky’s work… To support his colour theories, Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another (as when someone hears the ring of a doorbell as tasting of chicken or whatever).”