Peter Marks reflects on his first year covering theatre in Washington DC. “For a critic making his way through his freshman year in the area’s playhouses, these were the moments that defined the season, that most exuberantly lifted the spirit and dazzled the senses and boggled the mind.”
Tag: 06.29.03
LA’s New Home For Dance
Los Angeles has long had a troubled history as a nurturer of dance. But now that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is vacating the Music Center for Disney Hall, the Music Center is producing its own dance season. It’s a conservative season, but it’s a start on the road to developing a new dance audience. “Indeed, for better or for worse, the season supplies a kind of action painting of what American dance is like at the beginning of the century.”
The Golden Man Of The Golden Age Of Movie Musicals
There’s been speculation for some time now about whether the movie musical might return. To get an idea of the Golden Age of the movie musical, take a look at the work of Arthur Freed, a producer of musicals for MGM and “a producer of a type that no longer exists. No movie executive today can tap the wealth of talent that Freed had under contract at MGM, backed up by all the costumers, carpenters, electricians and painters he might need…”
Good Old-Fashioned Entertainment Outsells Empty Flash
Last weekend, the latest Harry Potter book outsold Hollywood’s biggest movie. This disproves the idea that kids need the fast-cut media rush to be entertatined, writes Frank Rich. “We live in a blockbuster entertainment culture, where the biggest Hollywood movies, most of them pitched at teenagers, saturate the market for a week or two, then vanish with little lasting trace on the collective consciousness. There’s not enough time for the word of mouth that might allow something special but not instantly salable to find a mass audience, so why should a big studio take the chance? It’s easier just to churn out the proven formulas and franchises, dumb and dumberer with each installment. This disposable blockbuster machinery is the antithesis of the career trajectory of the ‘Harry’ series.”
In Search Of Ratings, Aussie TV Takes A Dive
Australian TV is having a crisis of quality. It’s getting worse. “Without doubt, the commercial television industry is undergoing the biggest corporate shake-out of its 47-year history. The battle for profits has seen a generation of higher-placed executives recently cut loose. Proprietors have upped the pressure on the new guard to turn around a historic slump in advertising spending and cut costs even harder than their predecessors. They must boost ratings to attract more advertising dollars and make the network look better than its competitors.”
Frank Lloyd Wright Does Baghdad?
In the 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright went to Baghdad and drew up plans for “rebuilding Baghdad into a glittering capital of Islamic culture like the one that once dazzled the world.” Librarians at the Library of Congress in Washington DC have the plans, and some suggest they should be used. “Iraqis think we want to kill their culture. Yet when America’s greatest architect drew a plan for Baghdad in 1957, where did he turn for inspiration? Not to American or European ‘modernism,’ which was so fashionable at the time, but to Arab and Persian architecture, which had shaped the famous Baghdad of the 8th and 9th century.”
Asian-American Writers – The Next Wave
Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, The Joy Luck Club, “presented a heartwarming picture of Chinese American life that enjoyed wide mainstream acclaim, but that many younger Asians felt was overly romanticized, even ‘whitewashed.’ Now, whether a result of that legacy or the nuisance of persisting stereotypes that insist Asians are quiet, studious and obedient, the bulwark of “immigrant fiction” has burst. A flood of vital, angry, sometimes violent and even sardonic new fiction from young Asian American novelists is being released this year.”
Neuro-Mozart – Does It Exist?
Does listening to Mozart make you smarter? That’s the claim, repeated often, without much scientific study to back it up. Now the Neurosciences Institute, a “respected research body perched by the sea near La Jolla,” California is presenting a concert series with neuroscience experts to address the question.
Art In The Walls
“As contemporary artists increasingly turn to wallpaper as their chosen medium, this superficial material is gaining some serious respect. In fact, artists have been dabbling in wallpaper since the 16th century (or earlier), among them Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Rowlandson (whose ‘Grotesque Borders’ caricatured the British upper crust) and Salvador Dalí. Andy Warhol used it famously in 1966, when he papered the Leo Castelli Gallery with his ‘Cow Wallpaper,’ a fuchsia-and-yellow series of repeated bovine heads, accompanied by floating silver balloons. Like Warhol, most artists reviving this tradition do so with ironic or subversive results.”
David White Goes West
For 28 years David White has been executive director of Dance Theater Workshop in New York and “one of the movers and shakers” in the dance world. There’s not much he’s set out to accomplish along the way to producing 1000 or so artists that he has been unable to do. Now, at age 55, he’s leaving New York for St. Paul, Minnesota…