“The show is also big-budget, with capitalization costs said to top $18 million — a sum inflated in large part by the demands of developing a corps of wunderkind thesps who can handle the challenging title role. It’s also a big risk.”
Tag: 08.15.08
Germany: Can We Please Have Our Art Back?
“Fifty years ago, the Soviet Union returned 1.5 million art treasures looted at the end of World War II to East Germany. Twenty-eight German museums are staging a series of exhibitions to say thank you. Gratitude is one half of the message. The other is: Can we have the remaining 1 million works back now too, please?”
CD Sales Collapse In Australia
CD album sales were down 8.5 per cent in the first six months of the year compared with the same period last year. And in an indication of profit squeeze being felt throughout the industry, revenue from those album sales fell almost 11 per cent.”
The World Premiere Business
Everybody wants to be first with a play. Premieres make more news, attract more grants and confer more prestige. There’s often money involved–the theater premiering a play sometimes gets a piece of the subsequent action. It’s understandable–and even applicable to other professions. Journalists prefer to break stories than follow up on news already seen elsewhere. But the facts are the facts: I can’t tell you how often a New York theater will claim the American premiere of, say, an English play that we have already seen in Chicago.
All The World’s A Stage (On London’s Theatres)
“The national conversation in Britain these days seems to be taking place on stage: If these are great times for theater, they are grim times for reality, so you leave the theater both exhilarated and despairing. Play after play took up the same themes: the desperate economic underclass, the greedy upper class, dangerously disappointed immigrants, crumbling marriages, drugs, resentment of America, disaffection and decadence everywhere – what the English call, wryly and ironically, ‘happy families’.”
Legendary Editor L. Rust Hills, 83
L. Rust Hills, a staunch advocate of contemporary American literature who, as Esquire’s curmudgeonly fiction editor in three separate stints from the 1950s through the 1990s, published original works by scores of the country’s finest writers, died on Tuesday in Belfast, Me.
Argument Breaks Out Over Whether To End Library Fines
“Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late. It’s all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers.”
Vandals Break Chagall Window In French Church
“Intruders broke into the church, stole a few objects and broke the window – leaving a hole about 24 by 16 inches. The window, in the Metz cathedral, was designed and made by Chagall in 1963 and depicted Adam and Eve.”