Rumors have been swirling for months that Madison, Wisconsin’s much-celebrated Overture Center for the Performing Arts is in serious financial trouble. But “an informal survey of the larger resident arts groups that call Overture home” indicates that the fiscal problems have been exaggerated, and that the center is in no danger of bankruptcy.
Tag: 02.25.07
ENO To Lay Off 10% Of Performers, Staff
“The English National Opera is to cut 10% of its staff, axing about 45 jobs. The ENO said the losses, to include performers and technical staff, were needed to make it ‘artistically and financially viable in the long term’. It is aiming to cut fixed costs – £20m of its £30m turnover – saying it feared reduced funding if government money to the Arts Council did not increase.”
The Weird, Wonderful Stuff That Makes America Great
Baltimore’s unique and quirky American Dime Museum, which closed in December, is auctioning off its bizarre collection of American sideshow memorabilia. “Wandering through the place is an exercise in suspended disbelief.”
Filmmaker Claims To Have Jesus’s Stuff
“A Canadian documentary filmmaker will reveal at a news conference Monday that he has strong evidence a group of burial boxes unearthed in Jerusalem belonged to Jesus Christ and his family. The discovery could have profound implications 2,000 years after the boxes were placed in the ground, shaking the foundations of modern faith and raising Da-Vinci-Code-like speculation that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene.”
50% Of Kids Actually Have One, Y’Know
No one was more surprised than children’s author Susan Patron when her latest book began getting yanked from library shelves because of a mention of a dog getting bit on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. But predictably, the controversy (along with the book’s prestigious Newbery Award) has Patron’s book flying off the shelves at Amazon.
Beat Some Sense Into ‘Em
It’s an old complaint – the annoyance of trying to enjoy a play or a concert while all around you fellow patrons are talking, unwrapping crinkly candy, or forgetting to turn off their cell phones – but no one’s ever really come up with an effective way of making the clueless aware of their own thoughtlessness. One Twin Cities director “sometimes makes a pre-show announcement asking that the six audience members closest to the guy with the ringing cell phone beat the living expletive-deleted out of him until he can get there.” That might do it…