“Chicago architect Gary Ainge, who was principal in charge for the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park…, called the study’s conclusions accurate, though he cautioned against an overemphasis on bulging waistlines. ‘I don’t think it’s all body size,’ he said. ‘People’s expectations have changed about going to the theater.'”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
In Praise Of Ballet Hispanico’s Longtime Steward
“At a time when … it is assumed that we all care more for the bottom line than for the artistic mission of our organizations,” Ballet Hispanico’s departing executive director, Verdery Roosevelt, “knew that good art creates good financial health and she was truly and properly supportive of her artists.”
Judge Reduces $675K File-Sharing Damages To $67.5K
“US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the amount a federal jury ordered Joel Tenenbaum to pay last July was ‘unconstitutionally excessive’ in light of what she described as the modest harm caused to the record labels. She cut the award to $67,500, one-tenth the original sum.”
Second Stage Taps Casey Reitz As Executive Director
“Mr. Reitz, who will start in early September, will succeed Ellen Richard, who left Second Stage in June 2009 and was just named executive director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.” The Public Theater’s director of development, he “has helped oversee the Public’s $35 million capital campaign.”
Jury Selection In Critic’s Suit Vs. Plain Dealer, Orchestra
“The critic, Donald Rosenberg, filed the suit after he was removed in September from reviewing the [Cleveland Orchestra]. He said orchestra management pressed the newspaper into sidelining him because it objected to a string of negative reviews he gave to the orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Most.”
Comics Writer Harvey Pekar Dies At 70
“Pekar, by all accounts, was a tough guy to be around: angry, confrontational, beset by grudges and troubles over money, an obsessive worrier. He never hid any of this, but wrote about it instead. That made him as brave as almost any artist I can think of — unadorned, unfiltered, less concerned with how the world thought of him than with how he thought of himself.”
Baltimore’s Peculiar Cinematic Mythology
“Victoriana and vulgarity. Deco and decay. Such are the ways that the cinematic mythology of Baltimore infiltrates the imaginations and daily lives of the people who live here, creating a uniquely enchanted experience of the city, even at its grittiest and, sometimes, most hopeless.”
How Authors Came To Cast Themselves In Their Fiction
“[H]ere we were, writing in an era obsessed with celebrity and reality shows, where the first question readers and journalists nearly always threw at us was, ‘How much of this novel was based on your own personal experiences?’ At which point we faced the contemporary writer’s dilemma–we could be only one of two possible things: a liar or a bore.”
Boldface Supporters Help Tiny Publisher Get Funding Back
“A letter sent to Dedalus yesterday from Arts Council England area executive director Andrea Stark confirmed the publisher’s regular funding status would be restored, and that it would receive a grant of £26,900 in 2010/2011 for ‘the commissioning and publishing costs of new literary fiction in translation and the origination of new English fiction’.”
Streamlined Now, North Shore Music Theatre Reopens
“Shuttered for a year after going bankrupt in 2009, the beloved institution — once the largest nonprofit theater in the region, with close to 350,000 people attending annually — is coming back to life under [Bill Hanney’s] watchful eye. Hanney bought the place for $3.6 million in February and is overseeing every detail of the reopening….”