Out Of Development Hell, Onto The Stage

“New stage musicals in search of a … showcase-marketplace model have their own clearinghouse: the New York Musical Theatre Festival, a three-week bazaar of 34 new musicals that sprawls through midtown Manhattan next Sunday through Oct. 1. Though only in its third year, the festival has become so entrenched that top theater actors, designers and directors routinely waive fees for the chance to invest in the future of their field. Audiences have apparently been hungry for the chance to sample new work for a mere $20 per show: The festival boasted more than 95 percent capacity both previous years.”

Two Southern American Cities Get Concert Halls

“At first glance, the classical-music ambitions of Nashville and Atlanta look much the same: abandon a drab old hall and find fame and fortune with a sparkling new music temple. But on matters overt and subtle – from the balance of funding sources (public vs. private) to artistic vision – the two cities’ approaches to building a concert hall have little in common.”

Two Southern American Cities Get Concert Halls

“At first glance, the classical-music ambitions of Nashville and Atlanta look much the same: abandon a drab old hall and find fame and fortune with a sparkling new music temple. But on matters overt and subtle – from the balance of funding sources (public vs. private) to artistic vision – the two cities’ approaches to building a concert hall have little in common.”

Where’s Our War Art?

“War has generated some of the strangest, as well as some of the greatest and oldest, images in art. Neolithic cave paintings show swarming battles of stick figures armed with bows and arrows. Assyrian palaces were decorated with epic scenes of siege warfare. And so it goes, through the conquests represented on Trajan’s Column in Rome to the Battle of Hastings on the Bayeux Tapestry to … well, as it happens, not quite through to today. We have been at war for most of this century, but this global and unprecedented conflict has not yet inspired much art.”

DC’s Source Runs Dry

The end has finally come for Washington DC’s Souce Theatre. “The company has been in a long coma. Its last full season was five years ago, and a battle royal has been playing out for the past six months over the sale of its building on 14th Street NW. As the dust gradually settles on that process, the once-bustling Source is finally being laid to rest.”

Biographer Admits To Bio Hoax

Bevis Hillier has confessed to sending a fake letter to a fellow boigrapher and duping him. “Hillier, who spent 25 years researching and writing his own magisterial three-volume biography of Betjeman, finally decided to act when Wilson managed to bring out his book not much more than a year after his publishers had announced it. ‘When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much,’ said Hillier, 66.”

A Season Of New Concert Halls

“Five are opening in North America this fall, at a total cost of nearly $1 billion. They include the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, the new home of the Nashville Symphony, which opens next Saturday; the Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts in Toronto, the new house of the Canadian Opera Company, which had special inaugural concerts in June and opens its first season with a Wagner “Ring” cycle later this month; and the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, which comprises both a house for opera and ballet and a concert hall and opens officially on Oct. 5.”