Cannes opens today, and while “everyone may be expecting the bounty of good and even great films from around the world over the next 12 days, the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.”
Tag: 05.14.08
An Unusual Year For The Tonys
“The Tony nominations are in, and it would be difficult to come up with a season that presented a clearer portrait of where Broadway is headed and where it has been.” From a hip-hop musical to an acclaimed play penned by a writer new to Broadway, the nominations have a decidedly transitional feel.
Rauschenberg’s Dance Fixation
“Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg’s talent — always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions –prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dance theater.”
Freud Painting Sets Auction Record
“A life-sized Lucian Freud painting of a sleeping, naked woman has set a new world record price for a work by a living artist. The 1995 portrait, titled Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold for $33.6m at Christie’s in New York.”
Honda Robot Makes Podium Debut
“Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, made its conducting debut Tuesday at Orchestra Hall, leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in “The Impossible Dream” of Broadway fame… An engineer cued Asimo wirelessly.” Incoming DSO music director Leonard Slatkin showed up for the event, and joked to Asimo, “I’ll believe it when you conduct Mahler 7.”