Pamela Rosenberg is stepping down as director of San Francisco Opera. “Rosenberg has spent more time and energy than she had expected in efforts to rectify the company’s financial problems. In the face of steep budget deficits, she has had to scale back the scope of the company’s activities by almost 25 percent, cancel some new productions and make across-the-board staff cuts.”
Tag: 06.25.04
Hollywood Actors – The Summer Of Their Discontent
Two things are making Hollywood actors cranky this summer: “reality TV and DVDs – too new to have been fully absorbed into business as usual. The former is putting actors and writers out of work, and the latter is filling the coffers of the studios, to the consternation of the talent.”
Rating The Rosenberg Regime
And what will be the legacy of Pamela Rosenberg’s three-year reign at San Francisco Opera? “Rosenbergism — the complex blend of unusual repertoire, edgy musical values and concept-driven, psychologically fine-tuned dramaturgy that has defined her tenure so far — hasn’t been a complete success, but it hasn’t been tried and found wanting, either. The truth is that it was never completely tried at all.”
Study: Theatre Productions, Attendance Up, Money Down
“Attendance is up and the number of productions has risen by 15 percent at nonprofit theaters nationwide over the past three years. At the same time, more than half of the country’s noncommercial theater companies have been operating in the red, according to a Theatre Communications Group study.”
Seattle Arts Group Recruits Audience For Reviews
Seattle contemporary performance presenter On the Boards signs up audience members to blog reviews of its performances. Powered by ArtsJournal, the blogs stimulate interaction with OtB’s audience. Sure there have been negative reviews mixed in with the good, but OtB figured that “we want to offer a place for our audience to exchange ideas, and that’s what it’s turning out to be.”
Dance – Gone To The Men?
“American modern dance was created by women, who brought men into the fold as performers. The men began to make dances and now, some female choreographers say, have taken over the field. Even fewer women choreograph ballet. This is history simplified, of course, but questions linger.”
NY’s Indian Invasion
Broadway’s Bombay Dreams is only the latest piece of Indian culture to hit New York. “Jazz musicians have been absorbing ideas and collaborating with Indian musicians at least since the 1960’s. Hip-hop has latched on to Indian rhythms. In New York’s clubs, the sounds of Bollywood and other South Asian fusions have been drawing crowds for years: some to dance, some to listen, some to mingle and network.”
25 Playwrights, 1 Play
The Provincetown Repertory Theater finally has a home of its own at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and artistic director Lynda Sturner wanted to create something “spectacular” to celebrate its opening. So she signed on 25 playwrights to write a “chain” play. Each writer wrote a scene, evolving the stories and characters as they went along.
Artists, Not Buildings
Why is the Austraian government of Victoria spending most of its money on culture on building buildings? “Each year, arts and cultural buildings and the bureaucracy required to manage them, suck more and more out of the arts budget. This is not to say that we should tear down these buildings, but there must be more provision in the budget for artists to make the work that complements them; some balance between the desire for infrastructure and a genuine attempt to support the industry for which these buildings are created.”
From The Words Of The Dead
“You don’t have to be personally involved or angry to notice how often dead writers’ words are lifted and put in the mouths of their novelized selves today. Their lives and ideas have been borrowed, even more insidiously than they are on screen, in three novels about Henry James, one about his brother William and two about Sylvia Plath.”