“Record box office receipts, the best attendance in four decades and one of the most diverse lineups in a long time. Even that prescient kid from The Sixth Sense could not have foreseen the year Hollywood had.” (AP) Detroit News
Tag: 12.28.99
AN OPEN BOOK
Oregon’s Ashland Shakespeare Festival is one of the biggest regional theater operations in the US – 762 performances of 11 plays at three theaters from February to November. This year’s season was its most successful, with attendance of 374,246 and box office revenues of $9.9 million. Now a judge has ordered the company to open its books to a critic who has characterized the theater as “a medieval kingdom generating record revenues on the backs of nonunion workers.” (AP) Seattle Times
NOTHING TO LAUGH ABOUT
For the first time in memory there are no recently written dramas or comedies playing on Broadway. What does this say about the health of the city’s theater biz? New York Times
BROADWAY BOX OFFICE DOWN
Christmas week compared to last year as some shows raise ticket prices. Variety
NEW YORK “MOST” 99 THEATER LIST
Inside the New York theater world. CurtainUp
DEFINITELY WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Twenty-five years after Vermeer’s “Guitar Player” was stolen from London’s Kenwood House, the mystery of its theft and mysterious return still remains unresolved. London Evening Standard
APPLY YOURSELF
The applied arts are thriving in Kyrgyzstan, when traditional crafts are incorporating new Western ideas. New York Times
BEST KEPT SECRET IN BRITISH ART
That’s how reclusive 80-year-old artist Prunella Clough was described. Earlier this year she won the prestigious £30,000 Jerwood Prize for Painting, and Clough described it as a reward “for a lifetime’s grafting.” True to her nature, she promptly gave the money away to struggling artists. She died Sunday. BBC
HIDDEN TREASURE
University of Sydney collection is one of the best in Australia, rich in the history of Australian art. Yet, most of its 2,500 pieces of art are hidden away or distributed among buildings the public never gets to see. Is this any way to treat a national treasure? Sydney Morning Herald
INTERNET STANDARD TIME?
Britain’s Tony Blair proposes that Greenwich Time be adopted as a standardized world electronic time. BBC