The fall theater season has begun in New York – not that you’d notice. In fact, “between now and New Year’s Day there is exactly one new musical scheduled to open” on Broadway, which could put a serious dent in the Great White Way’s ticket sales. “It is musicals, particularly splashy new ones in nice big theaters, that are the engines driving Broadway’s economy, drawing nearly $9 out of every $10 spent on tickets last season.” Eight musicals are slated for spring 2005, but it may be a long, cold winter until they arrive.
Tag: 09.23.04
Words Fail Us (But Not Them, Clearly)
If you like British history and scholarly biography, it’s time to clear some space in the library, and possibly invest in some reinforced shelving as well: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is ready for shipping. Speaking of which, you may want to make that parcel post, since the collection weighs in at 280 pounds, with 60 volumes containing a thousand pages each. The project, which chronicles the lives of the great (and not-so-great) men and women of Great Britain over the last 1,000 years or so, was 12 years in the making, and more than 10,000 authors are represented in its pages.
The Day The Art Burned (And The World Laughed)
It was late May 2004 when an arson fire swept through a London warehouse, destroying hundreds of works of art valued at £50 million. The reaction of the British people was stunning: an outpouring of bitter glee aimed squarely at the much-reviled avant-garde artists whose work had gone up in smoke, and at the prominent but reclusive collector (Charles Saatchi) who had been their champion. Several months on, the losses from the fire are still being tallied, but the disdain of the public for what was lost remains palpable.
Raising Hell
Dino and Jake Chapman – the sibling artists who created the massive sculpture known as “Hell,” which is considered to have been the most significant artwork lost in the fire at Charles Saatchi’s warehouse last spring – will collaborate on a new version of the work, which they promise will dwarf the original. “Hell, a diorama which took the Chapmans more than two years to construct, using thousands of plastic soldiers, was bought by Charles Saatchi for £500,000. Mounted in glass cases arranged in the shape of a swastika, it showed scenes of torture and mass killing.”
Art Out Of Dysfunction
At a reform school for juvenile offenders, you might expect that an art class could be therapeutic, but most wouldn’t expect it to produce a large amount of wuality work. But at one such school in the UK, Rupert Christiansen’s expectations were dashed. “One would have expected more violence and neurosis, more splurges of abstract expressionism. I saw one copy of Munch’s The Scream, but otherwise the dominant aesthetic mood is oddly cheerful… I’ve no doubt that the persistent could earn places at art college. It is impossible not to be moved, impressed and heartened.”
Russ Meyer, 82
Russ Meyer, who deserves a large share of the credit (or blame) for taking the porn industry mainstream, has died in Los Angeles, aged 82. “Meyer directed only one major studio release, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but it was his 23 sexploitation movies featuring large-busted women, pastiche violence and stilted dialogue that left his mark on Hollywood… They hardly ever showed graphic sex and were always humorous self-parodies… In recent years they even earned him the reputation of a respected auteur with numerous film festivals around the world celebrating his strange vision. Respected universities like Yale and Harvard studied his movies.”
Michelangelo Frescoes Up For Restoration
“The Vatican is hoping to raise £2m to fund the restoration of Michelangelo’s last two frescos, which are hidden from the public in a chapel where the Pope prays and reads mass to private audiences. The frescos – the Crucifixion of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul – are faded after being exposed to dust and soot over centuries of candlelit prayer in the Pauline chapel, close to the better-known Sistine chapel. As the artist’s last paintings, the two six-sq-metre frescos are considered among the most important masterpieces in the Vatican’s care. When they were last restored, in the 1930s, several cracks were repaired.”