The statues of the Acropolis have been on their hill for 2,500 years. But soon they’ll be removed as the greeks move them down from the hill to a new museum. “Three cranes, standing up to 165 feet tall, will relay the sculptures from the old museum on the Acropolis to the new $174 million building — a distance of about a quarter-mile.”
Tag: 05.30.07
NBC Hits Ratings Lows
How low have NBC’s TV ratings fallen? Last week the network’s once golden Thursday night lineup was beaten by Univision, the Spanish-language network.
Royal Opera Buys DVD Venture
London’s Royal Opera House has bought itself a DVD recording and distribution company. “This gives us a substantial entry into the global DVD and digital marketplace. As a significant part of our digital strategy it also hugely increases what we have to offer our audiences both in and beyond the opera house, with new material for our Web site, and for education purposes.”
What The Arts Do For NYC’s Economy
‘The arts industry’s $21.2 billion economic impact in 2005 represented a 61 percent inflation-adjusted increase over 1993, the last time Alliance for the Arts did such a study, and 86 percent over 1983, the year of its first study. The $21.2 billion accounted for about 4 percent of New York City’s 2005 gross city product of $525.2 billion.”
HBO Negotiating To Film Redgrave In “Magical Thinking”
Vanessa Redgrave will headline “The Year of Magical Thinking” on Broadway for only four more months, but HBO is aiming to preserve her performance in the one-woman show.
Broadway Has A Record Year
“Revenue jumped 8.9 percent to $939 million and attendance rose 2.6 percent to 12.3 million for the season that ended on Sunday. The League of American Theaters and Producers, Broadway’s trade association, also said playing weeks — the number of shows multiplied by weeks they’re open — was the second highest on record at 1,509. The record for playing weeks was set in 2002-03, when ‘Hairspray” opened.”
Famed (And Troubled) Canadian Impressario’s New Talent Show
Impressario Garth Drabinsky has a new project – a talent show for TV called “Triple Sensation – aimed at performers aged 16 to 26 – will run on CBC this fall for three nights in the coveted 8-to-10 Sunday-evening time slot. The winner will take home a $150,000 Indigo-Chapters Books-sponsored scholarship that can be used for any theatrical training institution in the world (pending acceptance). A condition of this interview was no questions about Drabinsky’s impending trial or the fact he has been a fugitive from U.S. justice since failing to appear in New York Federal Court in 1999 on the fraud charges related to the 1998 collapse of Livent.”
End Of An Era – Canadian Record Store Closes
Sam the Record Man, once Canada’s top music retailer, is closing its flagship Toronto store. “Citing ubiquitous music downloads, Jason and Bobby Sniderman, the sons of Sam Sniderman and present owners of the flagship Toronto store, said rarely does a day go by without a story about declining CD sales. ‘We are making a responsible decision in recognizing the status of the record industry and the increasing impact of technology’.”
BookExpo GathersTo Talk Books
The annual BookExpo convenes in New York to dissect all things book. “Sales have been flat in 2007 and the number of independent bookstores continues to shrink, from 1,660 last spring to 1,580 this year, according to the American Booksellers Assn. Three BookExpo panels will focus on another troubling subject, newspaper reviews, in the wake of cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.”
What It Meant To Be Charles Nelson Reilly
“The greatest role he would be offered was that of Charles Nelson Reilly. Self-dramatizing by nature, he knew the depth, intelligence and heart of his character, and he had no need to bluff. Still, as he related in his solo show, he was astonished by his own success in the part. Never in his wildest dream would he have imagined that he — an oddball kid from the Bronx — would have appeared, by his own count, more than 100 times on ‘The Tonight Show’ and been able to circle his name 38 times in the TV Guide listings for a single week. For an actor who had been told by a TV executive when he was starting out that a ‘queer’ like him didn’t stand a chance, his prevalence on the air must have been intoxicating.”