Kevin Spacey may be a favorite target for theatre critics on both sides of the Atlantic, but you can’t argue with his drawing power. Spacey’s star turn in the critically derided Broadway play, A Moon For The Misbegotten, was enough to allow the show to recoup its entire investment and turn a profit in a limited run. That’s more than can be said for most Broadway shows, including this year’s critical darling, Spring Awakening.
Tag: 06.20.07
Preserving Modernism? It’s A Tough Sell.
No one ever accused modernist architecture of being nice to look at, but should ugliness be enough of a reason to avoid preserving a generation of buildings in the way that we preserve other schools of architecture? “But the actual threat to Modern architecture stems mostly from real-world concerns,” such as the fact that most of them are inefficient and costly to maintain.
Critics Weigh In On London LoTR
Now that Lord of the Rings has opened in West End, it’s time for London’s famously hard to please critics to have their say. And they are: “a thumping great flop,” says The Telegraph, and The Independent wasn’t much more positive, calling it “a show with a bit of an identity crisis, strong on dynamic spectacle, squeezed as a drama.” Still, a few critics liked the show, with The Times calling it “a wonder.”
Clear But Cold
Richard Ouzonian says that the London Lord of the Rings is both better and worse than its aborted Toronto run last summer. “What has the show gained since its run in Toronto? A more effective use of its sets and lighting, a clearer storyline in Act III and a smashing performance from Laura Michelle Kelly as Galadriel. What has it lost? About 20 minutes of its running time and almost all of its heart.”
Drawing New Fans By Striking Close To Home
A new play has been quietly building steam with some unconventional audiences this spring in New York. “Platanos & Collard Greens concerns itself with the tension between the African-American and Latino communities in New York and the overwhelming majority of men and women who go to see it, some over and over, are nonwhites.” Estimates are that by September, when the play ends its run, over 90,000 people will have seen it.
PBS To Offer New Programming Online
PBS has a unique problem in getting viewers to watch its programs – since local affiliates are allowed to make their own schedules, it’s almost impossible to promote a national start time for a new episode of an established program. Now, the public broadcaster is planning to get around this problem by offering new episodes of certain series online ahead of their first broadcast time.
Collector Hopes Stolen Painting Still In Australia
The collector who donated the Franz van Mieris painting which was stolen from a Sydney gallery last week is remaining calm about the situation. “It is in my collection and clearly one feels sadness that it has happened. [But] Van Mieris is not an obvious artist for someone to go for and that leaves some hope that it’s still in the country.”
What Goes Up Must Come Down… Or Must It?
The art boom has been going on for so long now that nearly everyone assumes that a crash similar to the one the art world experienced in the early 1990s is just around the corner. But what if it isn’t? “As the number of sages predicting a crash mounts, prices continue to spiral like an ever spinning top… Just as our cyclical weather patterns are changing, so are the economic and social forces that effect the art market.”
Rushdie Row Reignites
The fury of Muslims around the world at the announcement of the knighting in Britain of author Salman Rushdie caught the nominating committee that submitted him for the honor completely by surprise, despite the fact that Rushdie spent more than a decade under a death edict issued by Iranian clerics. “The writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.”
So The Rest Of The World Now Thinks Paul Is Dead?
Are the Beatles more globally relevant than Shakespeare? “An academic conference heard yesterday that [Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band] – released 40 years ago with perhaps the most famous sleeve in music history – has overtaken Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as a global cultural reference point.”