Tag: 06.27.06

New Leadership Model At Stratford

“Des McAnuff, who directed this year’s Tony-winning musical “Jersey Boys,” has been named artistic director at the Stratford Festival, the classical repertory theater in Ontario, Canada. As part of a new arrangement for Stratford, Mr. McAnuff will become one of three artistic directors, along with Marti Maraden, who has recently completed an eight-year term as the artistic director of English theater at the National Arts Center in Canada, and Don Shipley, currently the artistic director and chief executive officer at the Dublin Theater Festival. The team will be led by Antoni Cimolino, who was appointed as Stratford’s general director in April.”

Two Become One

The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery will both reopen this weekend following six years of renovation, and where once the two institutions shared a building but not a mission, they have been redesigned to function together. “A proliferation of offices and interior walls that once narrowed viewing space are gone, giving way to floor plans that sweep visitors from one museum to the other and back again… As they collaborate to tell America’s story through ideas and ideals, one conveys it thematically, the other through portraiture, each celebrating the complex forces and figures that have shaped the country since pre-Colonial times.”

Unconventional Beauty

In designing Paris’s new Musée du Quai Branly, architect Jean Nouvel didn’t exactly take the easiest road to public acclaim. “Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love. Its jumble of mismatched structures, set in a lush, rambling garden on the Left Bank of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, hardly conforms to notions of Parisian elegance… Yet for all of its flaws, Jean Nouvel’s building creates a kaleidoscopic montage of urban impressions. And once you give yourself over to the experience, you may find it the greatest monument to French popular culture since the Pompidou.”

Milne Family Won’t Regain Pooh Rights

“The granddaughter of the creator of children’s character Winnie the Pooh has failed in an attempt to regain the copyright on stories about the bear. Clare Milne was challenging a series of licensing arrangements in place since the books were created in the 1920s. In 1983 the present owner – the estate of literary agent Stephen Slesinger – signed a deal blocking AA Milne’s family from ever regaining control… Milne died in 1956 but bequeathed the ownership of the copyright to a trust rather than to his family.”

Rowling To Kill Off Two Potter Heroes

In case anyone was hoping that JK Rowling might reconsider her decision to make the next book in her wildly popular Harry Potter series the last, any such ideas can probably be put to rest with the revelation that two of the principal characters will die at the book’s end. Rowling says that she has known how she would end the series since years before she even had a publisher for the first book.

LA To Double Public Arts Funding

Los Angeles County will more than double its budget for arts grants in fiscal 2007, from $2.2 million to $4.5 million. The county board also awarded 5% of a $400 million surplus in fiscal 2006 to cultural institutions. “On the state level, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a $5.1-million budget for the California Arts Council — a $1.8-million boost that relies on projected income from arts lovers’ voluntary purchases of special arts license plates.” California ranks last in the nation in per capita arts spending.

MD Mutiny Brewing In Seattle

Mere weeks after extending the contract of music director Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony has been thrown into chaos amid what appears to be an open revolt against Schwarz’s leadership. Executive director Paul Meecham, whose tenure got off to a rocky start a few years back when he suggested that the SSO might need to look beyond Schwarz, has resigned, and the orchestra’s musicians are preparing to publicly release an internal survey expressing widespread dissatisfaction with Schwarz’s leadership. One well-respected musician who recently questioned Schwarz’s extension in a letter to a local weekly has also been tagged for dismissal from the SSO in what the musicians say is an obvious act of retaliation.

Another Louisville Manager Flies The Coop

A tumultuous year continues apace at the Louisville Orchestra, where the chief operating officer is leaving to become executive director at the Portland Symphony in Maine. Louisville previously accepted the resignation of its own ED in the midst of a bitter battle with the orchestra’s musicians over a proposed reduction in the number of full-time players in the orchestra, before managing to stabilize its perennially precarious finances without such reductions.