The future of London’s troubled Millennium Dome hangs in the balance after yesterday’s announcement that it needs an additional £47 million to stay open until the end of the year. – The Guardian
Tag: 09.07.00
OPERA LOVER
A Danish billionaire has decided to pay the entire £118 million cost of building Copenhagen’s first opera house. – Ananova
LOST AND FOUND
Long believed lost, supposedly rediscovered and recorded in the 1990s, then “refound” nine months ago in the basement of a Moscow museum, Shostakovich’s Second Jazz Suite is finally being faithfully reconstructed to its original form for its premiere at Saturday night’s closing of The Proms. – The Telegraph (UK)
TAKE IT SITTING DOWN
When La Scala’s season opens next week with “La Bohème,” the opera house’s famous standing-room galleries will be empty, due to fire-safety regulations. “This is tragic news for its habitual dwellers, the feared and respected ‘loggionisti,’ the ardent opera buffs who sit or stand in the galleries and are said to dictate failure or success.” – New York Times
STAR OF TOMORROW
A Canadian singer has taken first place in Placido Domingo’s $50,000 world opera competition in Los Angeles. – Los Angeles Times
MORALITY R US
The US Senate is holding hearings next week on violence in the entertainment industry. The buzz is about what Hollywood film executives might be hauled in to testify. – Inside.com 09/07/00
FILM FEST COMES OF AGE
The Toronto International Film festival turns 25 this year – “an event that not only has grown into one of the world’s most important film markets but also has become the prime launching pad for Oscar bait.” – New York Times
- WHY ART FILM LIVES: Back in the 1970s it looked like big commercial Hollywood blockbusters would take over the world. Toronto was begun as an antidote to that. The festival quickly proved that “in a miraculously sustained but constantly shifting way, international cinema refuses to lie down and die. You can starve it and stomp on it with Sylvester Stallone movies, but its lifeblood keeps pumping, and it keeps growing new limbs.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
FICKLE FILMGOERS
It’s commonly believed that big film awards – an Oscar or a Palme d’Or – work wonders for a filmmaker’s career. Not so for Bruno Dumont whose “l’Humanité” took home best actor, best actress, and the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes. “Depending on who you listen to, ‘l’Humanité’ is stultifyingly boring/ hypnotically entrancing, intellectually intriguing/exploitatively hollow, etc. Some audience members have insulted Dumont; others have held his hand and wept.” – The Guardian
LAST WORDS
Poet Ted Hughes’ last work, a theatrical adaptation of Euripides’ “Alcestis,” is being staged by acclaimed director Barrie Rutter in North England. “Theatre may not be life, but it is difficult not to find elements of Hughes’s own story in this his last passionate work about grief, sacrifice and resurrection.” – The Telegraph (UK)