Metropolitan Opera “General Manager Peter Gelb said on Friday the September 25 opening night performance of Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly,’ directed by filmmaker Anthony Minghella, would be beamed live to Times Square on a giant screen.”
Tag: 09.15.06
Booker Shortlist Surprises Experts
It’s one of the most eclectic lists in years. John Sutherland, last year’s chairman and author of How to Read a Novel, said it was a “bizarre” list that might signal a changing of the literary guard. “If you compare it with last year, the average age is five or 10 years younger. What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new.”
Tower Records Names A Top Bidder
The lead bidder for Tower Records has offered $90 million for the bankrupt chain. The company is more than $200 million in debt. “To put a human face on it, Harmonia Mundi USA is out $1.2 million worth of inventory to Tower, which, even if liquidated, the label will not get back.”
From The Top To TV
From the Top has become one of NPR’s more popular programs, and is “distributed to some 250 NPR outlets and boasts some 750,000 listeners.” Now it will be on TV too, in a new series broadcast from Carnegie Hall.
The Case Of The Missing Leg (And The Painting It Belongs To)
Forty years ago Jasper Johns made a plaster cast of Barbara Rose’s leg and included it in one of his works. Eventually it ended up in Iran. But when a collection of major Western art went on display last year in the Tehran Museum, the work was missing. Where, wonders Rose, might it have ended up?
Diabetes Stalls Baritone’s Career
“The Canadian Opera Company announced yesterday that baritone Pavlo Hunka has withdrawn from singing in its current production of Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring of the Nibelungs cycle, which concludes on Oct. 1. He will also not be singing in the company’s October production of Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte. Hunka walked out of Ring dress rehearsals eight days ago. At a release party held yesterday at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts for the singer’s new two-disc set of Ukrainian art songs, Hunka revealed that he has been diagnosed with diabetes.”
Lawyer: FCC Shredded Study Unfriendly To Big Media
Ten years after Congress passed a law which led to ever-greater consolidation of America’s radio and TV stations by giant multinational corporations, a former FCC staffer is claiming that the regulatory agency suppressed a 2004 study which concluded that the consolidation was hurting the quality of local TV news. “The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.”
Insanity As A Business Model
“In its increasingly aggressive campaign to establish itself as a showcase of Canadian theatre, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre is hiring a controversial Quebec director who says he plans to go mad on the job… In accepting the task of programming a nine-production playbill in a city with small and conservative theatre audiences, [Wajdi] Mouawad boldly announced that art is born from artists’ hallucinatory perspectives that change the way we see the world, and that his job was to promote this kind of madness.”
Embracing The Suburbs
A new Denver-area arts center aims to demystify a topic that many in the urban-centered cultural world would rather ignore: namely, “what is the relationship between culture and the suburbanization of America?”
Unmasking That Shadowy Ratings Board
The Motion Picture Association of America, which, among other things, issues age appropriateness ratings for every film released widely on American screens, operates with a level of secrecy generally reserved for international espionage organizations. A new documentary attempts to blow the lid off what the filmmakers see as an irresponsible and arbitrary process through which serious films are made or broken by their ratings. “The board’s members seem to have it in for independent films and hold scenes of sex, especially gay sex, to far more stringent standards than they do acts of violence.”