Trevor Nunn has been gone from London’s National Theatre only a month, and he’s launched into a new career – directing Ibsen. “No longer having to explain his decisions, he seems unburdened and even unbuttoned in the usual – and successfully youthful – head-to-toe denim (he is 63). He had hoped to do the Ibsen, in a new version by Pam Gems, at the National. But it got endlessly postponed, so when the Almeida asked me it seemed the obvious choice.”
Tag: 05.01.03
Blurring Art And Politics
Randall Packer is the U.S. Secretary of Art & Technology. Didn’t know there was one, did you? Well, okay, there isn’t. The whole thing is a performance art piece. And a website. And a series of treatises. But there’s a considerable amount of real-world crossover in Packer’s work, and the questions he’s raising about art, politics, money, and government are as valid and fascinating as if his Cabinet-level post were real.
Change of Heart
“The [Canadian] government plans to restore the $25-million subtracted from the Canadian Television Fund, sources at CBC and CTV say. ‘There will be a fall Canadian TV season after all’ is the way one CBC producer reacted to the unconfirmed news yesterday that the federal government will reverse its position and top up the fund that subsidizes Canadian TV programming to its former level of $100 million annually. The cut had resulted in chaos in producer offices and sparked industry protests as dozens of Canadian TV series and TV movies failed to receive funding grants. CBC and CTV were particularly hard hit.”
Change Is In The Air In Pittsburgh
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is in full red alert mode. The PSO is facing enormous deficits, little community support, and its search for a new managing director appears to be dragging on a bit, even as other major orchestras begin to snatch up promising candidates. Furthermore, the orchestra’s musicians have no input into the search process, which is highly unusual among major orchestras, and no one seems quite sure where the organization is headed. But everyone involved seems to agree that, whomever the PSO settles on as its new chief executive, a major change in the way the orchestra does business is a must.
Sawallisch Does Carnegie, But Cancels In Philly
It seems that Wolfgang Sawallisch’s tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra is coming to an end none too soon. The 79-year-old maestro, who has been battling severe fatigue lately, managed to muster the strength to conduct his final Carnegie Hall concert with the Fabulous Philadelphians this week, but his exhaustion has forced him to pull out of this week’s concerts back in Philly, and the orchestra is making no guarantees that he will even be on hand for his farewell concerts next week, or for a taxing 3-week tour beginning immediately thereafter. All this is unfortunate, says Peter Dobrin, but “Sawallisch’s last Carnegie concert will stand as a stunning and poignant musical memento.”
Up On The Roof: A Sure Sign Of Spring
“Few rites of spring are quite as delightful as the opening, each May, of the sculpture garden atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year the honor goes to the late Roy Lichtenstein. One of the prime movers of Pop Art, Lichtenstein was not exactly a bad sculptor, but he certainly wasn’t a good one, either. And yet, such is the magic of the sculpture garden that absolutely anything you put up there will look good.”
Theft, Damage Estimates At Iraq Museum Are Cut
It’s starting to become clear that estimates of the theft and damage of Iraq’s National Museum were too high. “While many museum officials watched in horror as mobs and perhaps organized gangs rampaged through the museum’s 18 galleries, seized objects on display, tore open steel cases, smashed statues and broke into storage vaults, officials now discount the first reports that the museum’s entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost. Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war. Other objects were placed in the museum’s own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact. Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum.”
Lousy Time To Hold A Festival
“The disastrous opening days of the World Stage festival at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre left organizers joking about biblical plagues. The final ones left them facing a modern one.” From the war in Iraq to a freak ice storm to cancellations to the SARS outbreak, World Stage was a disaster from beginning to end this year, and the hit came at a time when the festival was already struggling financially.
RSC Moving Towards Mixed Casting
The arts are all about diversity, of course, but in the theatre world, it can be difficult to draw certain lines. Can a black actor play Hamlet? If so, can a white actor play Othello, whose race is central to the play that bears his name? And what about accents? Must actors performing Shakespeare all use a standard, stock ‘Shakespeare’ accent? (Think Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud.)Increasingly, the answer has been that ‘mixed casting’ is not only allowable, but useful in many situations, and even the most staid and conservative companies are starting to experiment. Case in point: the venerable Royal Shakespeare Company, which has been raising some eyebrows during a residency in Washington, D.C.
A Thinking Woman’s College Ups The Arts Ante
Bryn Mawr College, just outside Philadelphia, is a famously intellectual place. But despite great achievement in many academic disciplines, the all-women’s school has traditionally shunned such pursuits as education and the arts, perhaps because women have so often been pushed in these directions in the past as a way of keeping them from getting ‘real’ jobs. But this is the 21st century, where women are no longer expected to be only schoolteachers and housewives, and Bryn Mawr is adjusting its curriculum accordingly, adding an intensive creative writing and literature program in an effort to fill the artistic void.