In only a year Theatre Aspen (Colorado) has doubled in size. And the growth will be even steeper. “That three-year plan to open a $10 million performing-arts institute for Theatre Aspen has now grown into more of a $50 million project that will include other local arts organizations.”
Tag: 07.02.06
Colorado Shakespeare Honcho Moves On
Dick Devin is leaving after 17 seasons as director of the Colorado Shakespeare Fesival. “Shakespeare may have written only 37 plays, but Devin will have seen 107 stagings and overseen 68 by season’s end. Way back in 1975, the CSF had become only the seventh theater company in the country to complete the entire canon, so repetition is inevitable.”
Controversy Over Chicago Symphony Musicians’ Barenboim Honor
As Daniel Barenboim was finishing his tenure as music director, a group of Chicago Symphony musicians got together and voted to name him their honorary “Music Director for Life”. But now other musicians who were not present at the meeting are objecting that the designation was not put to a vote of the entire orchestra.
Chicago’s Greatest Artist?
Harry Callahan was “the greatest visual artist who ever grew to maturity in Chicago,” writes Alan Artner. He was “up there with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. His work has been collected by every major art museum and has been seen in several retrospectives. But while most Chicagoans have heard of Adams, ask about Callahan and you’re likely to hear only about the movie cop played by Clint Eastwood, suggesting that special measures need to be taken.”
McDonald’s Reinvents Its Look
“The new, Starbucks-like look that McDonald’s has rolled out in this classic Middle American test-market tickles the design palette in a way that no knock-your-eyes-out architectural whammy by Frank Gehry or Santiago Calatrava ever will. We visit museums by those architectural stars, but we practically live in McDonald’s. The company estimates that more than 25 million people a day eat at its U.S. outlets. And now McDonald’s is playing a controversial, high-stakes game of architectural catch-up, transforming its harsh, plastic-heavy interiors into soft, earth-toned places where you might linger with your laptop in an upholstered chair beneath a stylish pendant light.”
Working Harder To Support Colorado Shakespeare
Retiring Colorado Shakespeare Company director Dick Devin “works in a world of ironies. The number of corporate sponsors has risen to 34 from just a handful a few years ago, but they give less and it costs more for the festival staff to bring in each one. Individual giving, however, is up. ‘We’ve increased the number of people who give almost threefold in the last few years. We value the 1,000 people more (who are giving) because that’s building for the future. Two years from now it’s really gonna pay off’.”
High Gas Prices Squeeze Travelling Bands
“Big-name, established acts with fleets of buses feel the gouge of those gas prices, but the initial pain is softened by the equally big bucks they bring in. It’s the smaller bands living hand-to-mouth on the road that are feeling the money pinch the hardest. The price of gas has forced many to rethink how they travel. A new practicality — a rare condition for free-wheeling rock bands — is becoming the norm.”
Samuel Beckett And His Strange Cult Of Personality
“Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in. But what were the chances that this spotlight would shine on him in the first place? He was an obscure writer writing in a foreign language about obscure figures living in a very foreign world.”
Measuring The Money You Donate And (As Important) The Results
Throwing money at a problem is one way to help fix it. But how do you tell if a foundation is making an impact with its giving? It’s a bigger problem than you might tink…
The Trouble With iPods
“The iPod experience is a smooth ride, as sleek and impervious as the minicomputer itself-set it to shuffle and you’re sealed up in a dream machine, a twinkling drift through your own forgotten highlights. But for the Gen X-ers among us there’s a problem. The signal squeezed through an iPod’s white earbuds is not the warm and spacious headphone mindblow of old; to me it sounds bruisingly compressed, stripped of nuance, all bunched up in the midrange. Increasing the volume only distorts the bass and produces a nasty precipitation of treble, as if the drummer is flogging his cymbals with bicycle chains.”