“I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis. Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.”
Tag: 08.20.07
What Comes Of Casting A Broadway Show On TV
“A funny kind of switcheroo happened on the road to Broadway. By using a TV program to cast the show’s leads, the producers have made the show feel like an adjunct of the TV program, like a season-finale-plus-one. But what has reached the stage of the Brooks Atkinson reminds me a lot of that moment in presidential politics when you watch the party nominee take the stage at the convention and think: Him?”
Summer Heat Claims Broadway Shows
Three big shows are calling it quits in a summer downturn.
Met Opera Has Record Opening Day Ticket Sales
“Sales topped $2.08 million, a 25 percent increase over last season’s opening-day sales of $1.66 million, after the box office opened to the general public Sunday. Sales on the Internet this year were nearly 50 percent higher than last year.”
Hollywood Looks To Set Record Box Office Summer
“We will certainly surpass $4 billion and probably be around $4.1 billion. I also think we will be at 600 million tickets sold, which we haven’t seen in a few years.”
Barnes Collection Fate Still Uncertain
“There’s a lesson in the ugly Barnes saga for all the private collections being turned into museums by the hedge-fund Barneses of our day: Donors don’t readily cut million-dollar checks to sanctify Barnes’s or anyone else’s quaint art theories. They want their Cezannes to hang next to his Cezannes. They want to attach their names to institutions that learn, grow and change.”
Pavarotti Still In Hospital Undergoing Tests
Officials at an Italian hospital have revealed opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti is undergoing more tests related to his pancreatic cancer after the singer was admitted in early August.
Broadway Casting (“Grease”) In The YouTube Era
The latest Broadway revival of “Grease” used TV to find its stars. So how’d they do? “There’s the numbing sense of performers of undeveloped talent conscientiously doing what they have been told to do and failing to claim their parts as their own. The message of this latest ‘Grease’ is that anyone, famous or not, can star in a Broadway musical, a natural enough conclusion in the era of YouTube and ‘American Idol,’ when the right to be a celebrity is perceived as constitutional.”
Investigative Report: What Is It About “H.S. Musical”?
“As anyone who has been within shrieking distance of a sixth grader during the past year knows, ‘High School Musical’ is more than a movie. It’s a crucial way station on the developmental road between ‘Powerpuff Girls’ and ‘Mean Girls.'”
Case Of The Disputed Pollocks
Is a trove of paintings really by Jackson Pollock? “The biggest mystery of all is this: if Pollock didn’t paint them, who did? And how did they wind up in that dusty storage bin? As with a maybe-Rembrandt or so-so van Gogh, the answer could take years. If we ever get one.”