The Producers is going to London. Richard Dreyfuss and Lee Evans are to star in a West End version…
Tag: 12.17.03
TV Going After The Gaming Audience
TV ratings are down this fall. And where did many viewers go? Computer games. So “top cable networks like Spike TV, MTV and Game Show Network are focusing on original programming that revolves around video games in an effort to regain the loyalty of an audience segment coveted by advertisers.”
American Immigration Bars Canadian Actor
After weeks of trying to get an important Canadian actor into the United States for an upcoming production, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre finally gave up and recast locally. “Since the creation the Department of Homeland Security, it has been increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for foreign artists to get into this country. While we tend to hear more often about artists from ‘hostile’ nations, such as Cuba, having the door slammed in their faces, the policy is obviously affecting Canadian artists as well.”
Barenboim Threatens To Quit Berlin Opera Company
Berlin Staatsoper director Daniel Barenboim has threatened to quit the company if a planned city reorganization of Berlin’s three opera companies goes through. Barenboim told the German daily Die Zeit that “the federation would jeopardise his artistic integrity as it had the final say in determining the Staatsoper’s programme. ‘Without changing the titles, the three directors have been reduced to vice-directors, because suddenly there is someone above them who dictates what they can and cannot do. If I can’t perform something that is musically important to me, I will not continue this job.”
Saddam’s Novel Approach To Defence
“Saddam Hussein spent the final weeks before the war writing a novel predicting that he would lead an underground resistance movement to victory over the Americans, rather than planning the defence of his regime. As the war began and Saddam went into hiding 40,000 copies of Be Gone Demons! were rolling off the presses.”
Canadian Recording Industry To Sue Uploaders
The Canadian recording industry says it is going to begin suing uploaders of music. “Any litigation would be a course of action we are really being forced into. It’s a process that’s a last resort, to try and address the huge problems, because the industry’s lost 30 per cent of its retail base since 1999. The losses [in Canada] are in excess of $425-million.”
Canada’s Cultural Leaders Ask: Hélène Who?
Since Canada’s new prime minister named Hélène Chalifour Scherrer to head the country’s culture ministry, cultural groups have been asking Hélène who? She is unknown in the cultural world. “Her very specific interest in amateur sport and the cries of rapture with which the Canadian Olympic Committee greeted her appointment to the portfolio, which does includesport, suggests she may lack the broad vision needed to tackle the large range of regulatory and funding issues that lie at the core of the Canadian Heritage mandate. Comments made to the CBC by her spokesman immediately after her swearing-in about running a “tighter ship” at a ministry that wasn’t going to be a “bank” any more didn’t help.”
Playing Favorites – What Your “Favorite Book” Says About You
“What’s your favorite book?” is a stupid question. “Really, it’s not about books at all, it’s about distinguishing yourself through your distinctions, choosing a work that gives the fullest picture of the person you’d like the world to consider you to be. That’s why everyone always says Catch-22 – not because they think Heller to be easily as good as Roth, Mailer, Updike and Vonnegut rolled into one. No one thinks that. It’s because of the myriad excellent messages enjoyment of this book gives off – I have a fine sense of humour; I’m anti-war and probably broadly leftwing; I have a healthy, questioning disrespect for authority; I like a bit of nooky, but not in a mean way, not like that Rabbit or that Zuckerman; and I’m highly intelligent, but I won’t get all in your face about it. You probably want to go out with me, it says, and you’re dead right.”
The New Divas
“This fall has seen a remarkable outpouring of albums by female opera singers,” writes Charles Michener. “The majority of them, as it happens, are not sopranos but mezzo-sopranos; we’re living in an age when, curiously, many of the most interesting female voices belong not to the leading ladies who impersonate the tragic heroines around which most operatic plots creak, but to a powerful group of slightly lower-voiced women who rival, and frequently outstrip, the prima donnas for vocal charisma.”
The WTC Tower Compromise
Later this week, the compromise design of the tower at the World Trade Center by Daniel Libeskind and David Childs is to be released. “As details of that compromise were uncovered, in interviews conducted over the last week, it appeared that except for a few elements, the tower will closely resemble a design forged initially by architects at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, house architects for Ground Zero leaseholder Larry Silverstein, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. That was long before Ground Zero master planner Daniel Libeskind was involved in the redevelopment process.”