Tag: 01.06.05

More Pay Cuts Loom in Pittsburgh

The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre is seeking a pay cut from its pit musicians for the third time in three years, in a desperate effort to balance a budget which has been swimming in red ink in recent years. The situation was exacerbated by disappointing ticket sales for the company’s 2004 Nutcracker performances, after which PBT asked the musicians to reopen their contract, which officially expires in summer 2005.

How The Rockettes Stole Christmas

This was the first year in Boston for the touring Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and now that the holiday dust has cleared, local arts groups are reporting that everyone’s fears about the touring Rockettes were entirely justified. “Business was down at the Boston Pops, Handel and Haydn Society, Revels, and Boston Ballet… The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the corporate entity that oversees the Pops, canceled three Holiday Pops concerts because of slow ticket sales,” and the ballet, which was booted from its traditional home to make way for Radio City, reported disappointing ticket sales for its revamped and Nutcracker. Meanwhile, the Rockettes sold 200,000 in less than a month.

Playing To The Crowd

Chicago’s Lyric Opera is tightening its belt a bit this season, and is going to extraordinary lengths to keep its subscribers and donors happy. Part of that effort can be seen in the company’s choice of programs for next season: plenty of old warhorses, not a single American opera in the bunch, and a new staging of “Rigoletto” to replace the last new staging of “Rigoletto” Lyric mounted in 2000, which prompted dozens of furious letters from subscribers due to its, um, “frank sexuality.”

Anatomy of a Work Stoppage

At the heart of the dispute between the St. Louis Symphony’s managers and musicians are the dueling issues of fiscal sanity and competent oversight. The SLSO flirted with bankruptcy in 2000, a financial crisis brought on by years of dipping into its endowment and mismanaging the money on hand. In the years since that low point, the organization has raised $130 million, bolstered its endowment, and paid off a lot of debt. The musicians, who accepted major salary cuts to allow the SLSO to get back on its feet, now believe that they’ve earned the right to get back some of what they lost. The management insists that it isn’t yet financially stable enough to take that step.

Finding Wright Buyer A Chore

Great to own a Frank Lloyd Wright house, eh? But “some owners of one-of-a-kind houses conceived by the iconic architect are discovering it’s not easy selling them in an era when cathedral ceilings and easy commutes are on the wish lists of many prospective purchasers. But the sellers are also concerned about finding the right Wright buyers – ones who will cherish, not demolish, his creations.”

Dance: Ready For A New Boom?

Has dance lost its steam, ready to settle into being a “lesser” art? Anna Kisselgoff says not: “The dance boom that exploded at the end of the 60’s and lasted until the 90’s has shrunk into a holding pattern of recycled aesthetics. But even this consolidation of the familiar hints at potential fresh directions. True, no one has recently or radically changed how we look at dance, as Merce Cunningham, Graham and Balanchine once did. Still, dance remains a highly creative art form. Choreographers are searching for new movement, and there is a slow-motion swing from pure-dance pieces to storytelling, no matter how indirect.”

Fox Reality: A Dismal Year

Fox TV, which has stacked its future heavily on reality shows, is having a terrible year. “The network has lost about 8 percent of its viewers from a year ago (8.5 million, down from 9.2 million), but Fox, like NBC and ABC, cares most about viewers between ages 18 and 49 because advertisers pay a premium to reach that group. There, Fox is off even more: 11 percent, dropping to a 3.3 rating from 3.7. A rating point in the 18-to-49 category is worth about 1.3 million viewers. In reality (and that word cuts several ways in Fox’s case), the picture is considerably worse.”

Zeffirelli: La Scala Season A Disgrace

Franco Zeffirelli has attacked La Scala’s comeback season. Zeffirelli accused the opera house of inviting second-rate conductors to perform. Writing to a journalist on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, who had written approvingly of the programme, he said the situation “risks becoming utterly absurd and developing into a scandal of truly international proportions because La Scala belongs to the whole world”.