Lloyd Richards, the Tony Award-winning director and educator who brought August Wilson’s works to the stage and directed the famed 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” has died in New York.
Tag: 06.30.06
DVD Sales, Rentals Slump
In the first half of this year “video purchases are down 3.6 percent, to $7 billion, while rentals fell 3.9 percent to $3.9 billion. Studio executives aren’t surprised, saying that the now-mature DVD business has become increasingly product-driven.”
Turning Porgy Into A Musical
Director Trevor Nunn is turning Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (the opera) into “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” (a musical). So why does such a great opera need to be reimagined (or at least repackaged)? “It’s the most sensational, wonderful, wonderful score, and so many of the people in the world know it but they don’t know they know it,” Mr. Nunn said in a telephone interview yesterday from London, where he was attending auditions. The problem, he said, was that the operagoing audience is small.
If All Of America Could See Just 365 Plays…
“From Nov. 13, 2002, to Nov. 12, 2003, Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a short play each day. Now comes ‘365 days/365 plays,’ conceived and produced by Parks and Bonnie Metzgar. Billed as the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S. history, hundreds of theater companies around the nation will team to make sure that each play is staged on its fourth birthday — or at least during its birthday week — starting Nov. 13, 2006.”
20 Percent Own Digital Music Players
A new study reports that “one in five Americans over the age of 12 now own a portable digital music device, and one in 20 of those quizzed said they possessed more than one.”