Part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s plan to reinvent includes being a major player in London’s West End. But that plan is faltering after the company’s last five plays there have taken in only 20 percent of what they needed to at the box office. “The plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been rapturously received by critics, and sold out when they were premiered at Stratford-upon-Avon, but London audiences have been staying away.”
Tag: 01.05.03
279 Movies Eligible for Academy Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that 279 movies are eligible for this year’s Academy Award nominations. “We will next week mail a complete list of those films along with nominations ballots to academy voters, allowing them to nominate these movies or their actors, actresses and directors for awards this year.”
Computer-assisted Art
How is the computer changing the ways artists make art? We don’t mean digital artists, but those traditional artists who have begun using the computer as a tool in their artmaking…
Curiously Refreshing – A Small Theatre’s Fight For Rights
In 1999 Denver’s fledgling Curious Theatre tried to get rights to a Paula Vogel play it wanted. But the big Denver Center had first-refusal rights. So as consolation the rights-administrator granted Curious rights to another Vogel play – “How I Learned to Drive,” which the DCTC had passed on, and which then won a Pulitzer Prize. Now Vogel is working with Curious again: “To me, that’s why we are doing theater, to disturb the air; to offend people. There is such a need for these smaller companies that will take risks, that will read new plays.”
Examining The Face Of Evil
We like to think of evil as an aberration. That’s why it upsets some to examine the face of evil up close, as something more than an abstract. “Barely a year removed from the grisly, televised details of mass murder in the middle of New York City, evil has become tougher to pass off as a metaphysical bogeyman or a freakish glitch. And films including Max, The Pianist and Blind Spot are here to remind us that the Holocaust was suffered, perpetrated and even exploited by flesh-and-blood entities, not mythical embodiments of cruelty.”
Critic Society Chooses “The Pianist” As Top Film
Critics of the 55-member National Society of Film Critics have named “The Pianist,” the biography of a Polish-Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor, as best picture of 2002. The movie also won best director, actor and screenplay awards from the society Saturday.
Talking To The Funders Who Make The Decisions
Toronto has a number of major arts projects currently looking for funding. In the current funding climate “is there enough money to go around and sustain all these projects? Or are at least some of them doomed to fail while others succeed? The answers to those questions will largely depend on two kinds of players — the arts philanthropists of Toronto and the professional fundraisers hired by various cultural organizations to lead their capital campaigns.” Here’s what they say…
Book Jacket Portraying WWII Nazi Ties Upsets Swiss
A new book by a Clinton administration official who led negotiations with Switzerland, Germany, France and Austria to “get nearly $8 billion in reparations for art, unpaid insurance policies and confiscated bank accounts taken from Jews during World War II” is angering the Swiss. The objections are not so much about the content, as the cover, which “has a swastika made of gold ingots spread over the red Swiss national flag.” But author Stuart E. Eizenstat and his publisher say the design “accurately reflects what he learned during the negotiations in the late 1990s.”
Kennedy Honors – Where Are The American Male Singers?
So how is it that six male opera singers have won Kennedy Center Honors since the awards were started in 1978, but never an American male opera singer?
Celebrating (And Saving) St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Russia is a remarkable and historic city. It’s listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it turns 300 years old this year. So the city is exporting the best of its culture to the rest of the world to celebrate. But “if musicians, dancers, historians, designers, poets, actors and more are reintroducing St. Petersburg to center stage, the attention comes in the nick of time. Buildings are crumbling. Population is declining. Tourism is stagnating. The cultural community is dispersing. And modernity – in the form of bold new architecture – is knocking aggressively at the door.”