“Seventy-two countries are competing for the top prize – the Golden Lion. For the first time there are separate pavilions devoted to African and Roma, or Gypsy, art.”
Tag: 06.10.07
Spring, Utopia Rake In Tonys
“Stoppard’s epic trilogy ‘The Coast of Utopia’ won seven of the awards given for Broadway productions and performances, including best play and director, and ‘Spring Awakening’ dominated the musical categories, taking home eight prizes including best musical and direction of a musical.”
The Tonys – Power To The People
“Have there ever been more actors nominated for playing real-life characters? Glancing through the names of performers and parts, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Biography Channel had recently been hijacked by a squadron of Broadway all-stars.”
Broadway – Economic Juggernaut That Keeps Growing
Broadway theatre did $939 million of business this season. “If the growth continues at a similar rate next season, Times Square box offices will break the billion-dollar barrier — this just a few years after Broadway producers worried about their future after the terrorist attacks of 2001, which scared off foreign visitors and depressed ticket sales and grosses alike.”
Classic TV Finds Ways To Escape The Vaults
“As television collectors large and small continue to digitize and upload thousands of rare old film reels and videotapes, YouTube is threatening to become a repository of television history that could rival the nation’s leading broadcast museums, both in the scope of its offerings and in the number of people it can reach.”
Why Does Britain Do Theatre So Well?
“Broadway, in case you’re wondering, is second to none when it comes to buzz, and to audiences that, as Ian McKellen remarked when he won his Best Actor Tony for Amadeus in 1981, ‘lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them’. But you can’t compare a city with (in a good year) 40 openings a season – and perhaps as many again in the major off-Broadway venues – to a capital like London that can open well over 250 shows in a year, from big musicals to agitprop, site-specific experiments to star vehicles, and reclamations of unfamiliar plays to soul-stirring reappraisals of time-honoured ones.”
Action Movies, Geriatric Edition
“How do you take a bunch of middle-aged men (Bruce Willis is 52, Sylvester Stallone is 60 and Harrison Ford is 65) with saggy skin, creaking bones, thinning hair, paunches and back problems, and make them seem like taut, high-kicking, death-defying action stars? How do you make Ford dodging spears and dashing through the jungle look credible? How do you put the wow factor into Willis leaping from a moving plane? And how do you shoot Stallone in a tight T-shirt and headband, waving an enormous gun around, without it seeming, well, silly?”
The Perfect Musical (Second Time Around?)
The “Lord of the Rings” that played in Toronto was hardly a big hit. Now the show is in London. “So how do you go about turning a semi-hit into a show that can take its place, in the West End’s top three alongside Billy Elliot and The Lion King?”
The Irrationality Of Auctions (eBay Edition)
“The Romans knew something that modern economists lost sight of at some point: Auctions lead people to do weird things. For a long time, economists have explored and even reveled in the supposed purity of auctions, viewing them as uncannily efficient means of moving goods into the hands of people who value them the most. In fact, studying auctions has long been a fertile subfield within economics.”
Define A Hit Show? Betcha Can’t…
As Broadway gears up for tonight’s Tony Awards ceremony, a glance at this year’s crop of plays and musicals proves exactly one thing: there is just no accounting for what does or doesn’t become a hit on the Great White Way.