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Friday, December 24, 2010

Los Angeles Museum to Oversee Watts Towers

December 23, 2010, 4:13 pm

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said on Thursday that it had completed an agreement with the City of Los Angeles that puts the museum in charge of efforts to repair and preserve the Watts Towers, the cathedral-like spires and crockery-encrusted forms built by the self-taught artist Simon Rodia in his spare time over more than three decades. The towers, which were once almost demolished by the city and then later designated a national landmark, were damaged slightly in the 1994 earthquake and again during a 2008 windstorm.

The museum, with $150,000 supplied by the city’s department of cultural affairs, will collaborate with other art institutions and with community groups in the Watts neighborhood to assess the site’s condition and make a plan for repairs and conservation. The hope is that the effort will lead to greater philanthropic attention and a source of long-term financing to maintain the towers, two of which soar more than 90 feet and have become symbols of Los Angeles’s cultural history.

Rodia, an immigrant from Italy who died in 1965, used basic tools and found or donated materials (scrap iron, mesh, shells, broken glass and tile) to build the massive artwork, which he described as a monument to America and to the human spirit. “I had it in mind to do something big,” he once said, “and I did it.”

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'Spider-Man' Musical Will Resume Performances

December 23, 2010, 5:40 pm

By PATRICK HEALY

The Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is a go to resume performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, a spokesman said three hours before curtain — the first show since a stunt actor was seriously injured mid-performance on Monday night.

The producers canceled the musical’s two shows on Wednesday, at a cost of roughly $400,000 in ticket sales, to put a new safety plan in place for the 38 aerial and stage maneuvers in “Spider-Man” that involve actors hoisted and tethered in harnesses. State safety inspectors visited the Foxwoods Theater on Thursday afternoon and gave final approval to the new safety measures, which involve two stagehands securing each actor in a harness and then telling a stage manager that the maneuver is ready to begin, as opposed to the past practice of a single stagehand simply rigging each actor.

“All of the safety redundancies are in place,” Leo Rosales, the spokesman for the inspectors with the New York State Department of Labor, said on Thursday afternoon. Two understudies have been training and rehearsing for the last two days to step into the stunts and roles previously performed by the injured actor, Christopher Tierney, who remains hospitalized with broken ribs.

The understudies have had weeks of training on the stunts, yet Mr. Tierney has been the one performing them, including some of the $65 million show’s most elaborate sequences where characters fly over the heads of audience members.

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'Spider-Man' Musical Safely Swings Through Performance

“Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went off without injury or any major technical hitch on Thursday night in its first performance back on Broadway since a stunt actor was badly injured after falling more than 20 feet during a scene in Monday night’s show.

There appeared to be no problems with a new safety plan that involved two stagehands, not one, rigging actors into their flying and acrobatic harnesses for the 38 maneuvers that involve aerial sequences or potentially risky choreography. At one point near the end of the show, one stagehand came out onstage to rig the actor Reeve Carney into a harness for a sequence where he scampers across an enormous net and jumps from it; no second stagehand was visible, though crew members might have started rigging up Mr. Carney before the scene began. The stunts went fine in that scene for Mr. Carney, who plays Peter Parker and is one of the actors playing Spider-Man.

Before Thursday night’s performance began, the lead producer of “Spider-Man,” Michael Cohl, took the stage and told the packed house at the Foxwoods Theater that the injured performer, Christopher Tierney, had undergone surgery and would begin rehabilitation on Monday. The audience applauded loudly at the mention of Mr. Tierney, whose accident has drawn wide news media coverage and led state and federal workplace safety officials to insist on the new plan to help protect the actors.

Several audience members said on Thursday night that they had purchased tickets to the musical — the most expensive ever on Broadway, at $65 million, and the most technically ambitious — in part because of the news media coverage this week. These theater-goers said they had been curious about the stunt work in the show and its mix of artistry and technical elements. The production itself, however, drew mixed responses.

“There is a reason for having out-of-town tryouts for a major new musical before coming to Broadway, and while I know it’s expensive, ‘Spider-Man’ would have been helped a whole lot by one,” said Kenny Solms, a longtime comedy writer who helped create “The Carol Burnett Show” on television and whose play “It Must Be Him” ran in September at Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons. “And based on the seven minutes or so of flying in a three-hour show tonight, I have to see that if I’d wanted to see flying, it’s more magical and memorable in ‘Peter Pan.’”

But David Ravikoff, a tourist from Washington, who said that the recent media hubbub was one reason he wanted to see the show, said that he was dazzled by the creativity and the special effects.

“I was sort of expecting it to be ‘Spider-Man’ as we’ve all come to know the comic-book story, but the show had these wild, mythological, psychosexual dramatic layers that I loved, that I thought were so Julie Taymor,” said Mr. Ravikoff, referring to the “Spider-Man” director, who also directed “The Lion King” musical and the films “Across the Universe” and “The Tempest,” among others. He added, “I’m not really sure what was going on in parts, but I was totally impressed.”

Absent on Thursday night was one of the lead actresses, Natalie Mendoza, who had been out of the show for a couple of weeks early this month with a concussion; though she and the rest of the cast had not performed since Monday night, she was ordered on vocal rest by her doctor, according to a “Spider-Man” spokesman. An understudy played the role of the spider villainess Arachne.

The actors Ari Loeb and Kyle Post divvied up the roles and stunt work usually shouldered by Mr. Tierney, meanwhile.

The producers had canceled the musical’s two shows on Wednesday, at a cost of roughly $400,000 in ticket sales, to put a new safety plan in place for the 38 aerial and stage maneuvers that involve actors hoisted and tethered in harnesses. State safety inspectors visited the Foxwoods Theater on Thursday afternoon and gave final approval to the new safety measures, which involve two stagehands securing each actor in a harness and then telling a stage manager that the maneuver is ready to begin, as opposed to the past practice of a single stagehand simply rigging each actor.

“All of the safety redundancies are in place,” Leo Rosales, the spokesman for the inspectors with the New York State Department of Labor, said on Thursday afternoon.

“Spider-Man,” with music and lyrics by U2’s Bono and the Edge in their Broadway debut, has pushed back its opening night to give more time to Ms. Taymor and the rest of the creative team to continue working on the show. Previously set for Jan. 11, 2011, the new opening night is Feb. 7.

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Slice of San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — The lobby of the War Memorial Opera House is already intensely theatrical in “Nutcracker” season, with a perfect tree not only beautifully decorated but also spotlighted. In the afterglow that follows the matinee, children and their parents linger a long time, and many photographs are taken. This, with Houston, is one of the two best-dressed “Nutcracker” audiences of my travels – and, if the attire is less spectacular than Houston, it’s more elegant.

It’s in this opera house that America’s first complete “Nutcracker” had its premiere, in 1944: the same version, choreographed by Willam Christensen, that I saw danced by Ballet West two weeks ago. One look at the dancers and I’m reminded that San Francisco Ballet is among the best companies in the world: finesse, elegance, polish, line, technique, ease. One look at the cast list and I’m aware that this is an exceptional matinee, with Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimets as the Queen and King of the Snow, Vanessa Zahorian and Taras Domitro as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her consort, and Elana Altman, Ricardo Bustamante, Val Caniparoli, Frances Chung and Pascal Molat in supporting roles.

Unfortunately, travel delays meant my flight to San Francisco was three hours late, and so I arrived only in time for the last few dances of Act 2. I regret this not just as a dancegoer but as a tourist: Helgi Tomasson’s production is set in the 1915 San Francisco World Fair.<

There is plenty to say even about the little I see. Martin West does some of the best conducting I have heard from him, and the company’s orchestra is a match for its dancers. This is neither the first nor second production in my recent experience to feature a dancing bear, but I hope it is the only one where the bear emerges from the skirts of Mother Ginger (here called Madame Du Cirque). Ms. Zahorian and Mr. Domitro are outstanding in the grand pas de deux, which features some prominent references to both the 1892 Ivanov and 1954 Balanchine versions.

But there and in the Waltz of the Flowers, Mr. Tomasson lets appealing dance ideas flounder blandly without building them into an architectural and musical array that would make them poetic or memorable. It’s confusing to have a Sugar Plum Fairy who dances none of the music that Tchaikovsky designated for her. Instead she leads the Waltz of the Flowers. Then young Clara steps through a Narnia-type door that transforms her into a ballerina (Ms. Zahorian). This alter ego device is set to a passage from the Sugar Plum adagio that’s taken out of context, right before the adagio then occurs. It’s a jarringly unmusical effect of structure.

I’m told 85 children appear in each performance here. Is this – surpassing Boston Ballet’s 83, Ballet West’s 65 and New York City Ballet’s 55 – a present-day “Nutcracker” record?

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'Born Yesterday' May Return to Broadway With a New Star

A Broadway revival of Garson Kanin’s play “Born Yesterday” is in the works for spring 2011, possibly with a relatively unknown actress in the lead role that Judy Holliday made famous more than 60 years ago, two theater executives familiar with the plans said on Tuesday.

Nina Arianda, who received rave reviews last spring and several acting awards for her first major Off Broadway performance, as Vanda in the dark comedy “Venus in Fur,” is in discussions to play Billie Dawn, the showgirl mistress of the corrupt businessman Harry Brock, according to the two executives who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revival was still in unofficial planning stages.

The actor Jim Belushi, best known from the ABC comedy “According to Jim,” is in discussions to play Brock; the two executives were not aware of who might play Paul Verrall, the good-guy journalist whose tutoring of Billie Dawn helps open her eyes to her boyfriend’s shady ways. The timing of the production depends in part on Mr. Belushi’s availability once his current television series, “The Defenders” on CBS, concludes taping this winter.

The original Broadway production of “Born Yesterday” opened in February 1946 with Ms. Holliday, Paul Douglas as Brock, and Gary Merrill as Verrall, and ran for nearly four years; Ms. Holliday went on to win an Academy Award for best actress as Billie Dawn in the 1950 film version, which included Broderick Crawford as Brock and William Holden as Verrall.

Doug Hughes is signed on to direct the revival; he most recently directed a revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” on Broadway, and won the Tony for best director of a play in 2005 for “Doubt.”

The producers are Philip Morgaman, Anne and Vincent Caruso, Frankie J. Grande and James P. MacGilvray. The show’s publicist, Richard Kornberg, declined to comment on Tuesday.

The play has been revived once on Broadway, in 1989, starring Madeline Kahn in a production that ran just five months.

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Cherry Lane Theater Artistic Director to Leave and Sell Building

December 21, 2010, 4:36 pm

By FELICIA R. LEE

Angelina Fiordellisi, the artistic director of the nonprofit Cherry Lane Theater, a Greenwich Village institution since 1924, will step down next year, she said on Tuesday. She said that she plans to sell the building, at 38 Commerce Street, and that constant financial struggles in recent years and the changing nature of the business had led to her decision.

In September, Ms. Fiordellisi announced that the Cherry Lane would not produce plays on its main stage for a year or longer to buy time to cope with a deficit that now stands at $250,000. Ms. Fiordellisi attributed the shortfall to a steep drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales and rental fees.

“It’s frightening to me, what’s happened to Off Broadway theater,” said Ms. Fiordellisi, who plans to step down between March and June. “I feel that we can longer do theater for the sake of the art form. We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it’s so financially prohibitive. I don’t want to do theater like that.”

Still, Ms. Fiordellisi said, her tenure at the theater has been “just glorious” because of the chance to “revive the spirit” of the theater and to produce work by playwrights of the caliber of Edward Albee. She has identified strong candidates to succeed her, she said, pending approval by the theater’s board.

Despite its fabled past — the theater was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has showcased work by Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard — it had not staged a play in two years when Ms. Fiordellisi bought it for $1.7 million in 1996 and renovated it for $3 million. She hopes to sell it for $12 million, Ms. Fiordellisi said, adding that she had some interested buyers. The price includes the 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio.

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Five-Million-Book Google Database Gets a Workout, and a Debate, in Its First Days

Ngram, Google’s new searchable dataset of words and phrases from 5.2 million published books, got quite a workout on its first day. Within 24 hours after its launching last Thursday afternoon, more than a million queries were run.

Various Web sites have had fun with the new technological toy since its unveiling, running idiosyncratic searches on topics of interest. For example, Tablet magazine focused on Jewish topics. The Atlantic compared “vampire” and “zombie,” and asked whether “pen” is mightier than “sword.” And Jezebel played with terminology about sex and relationships.

On an enormous scale, the database is the kind of resource that humanities scholars are increasingly using for their research, the subject of a New York Times series. And scholars and other interested observers have vigorously debated the reliability of this sort of data, pointing out previous problems with Google Books, including mistakes in dates, misattributed authors and errors in the actual texts as a result of misinterpretations by the automated scanning devices that copy the books.

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been critical of Google Books data, still has his complaints, as he outlined in a Chronicle of Higher Education article. But he conceded that the error rate is much improved in this dataset.

Jean-Baptiste Michel, who designed the database with Google, said by e-mail this weekend that the team recognized that including information with errors was worse than not including it at all, so all books that did not pass strict standards for accurate labeling and scanning were filtered out.

“That is why we end up working with 5.2 million books and not the whole 15 million,” Mr. Michel wrote. (The 15 million figure refers to the number of published books that Google has digitally scanned so far.) “These filtering algorithms took us over a year to improve to our satisfaction. Indeed, if we hadn’t worked on them, we’d have published our very first version of the Ngrams, totally unfiltered, back in 2008.”

Their methodology is explained in detail in the supplemental materials attached to the paper by Mr. Michel and his collaborator, Erez Lieberman Aiden, published in the journal Science.

For their paper, Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden based their research on books published in English from 1800 to 2000. “We do not consider that trajectories outside of English 1800-2000 are scientifically validated,” Mr. Michel wrote. “In particular, before 1800 there are just too few books: one does not have enough statistical power.”

So while you can search back to 1500 on the Ngram database, don’t try using the information you might find to win tenure.

Mr. Lieberman Aiden, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, also addressed the criticism that no humanists were on the research team. “I don’t think this is a very fair criticism,” he wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “I studied philosophy at Princeton as an undergrad, got a master’s degree in Jewish history, and actually took a leave of absence from a Ph.D. program in Jewish history when I went to grad school in the sciences (I did not return).

“Two of our other authors, Joseph Pickett (Ph.D., English language and literature, University of Michigan) and Dale Hoiberg (Ph.D., Chinese literature, University of Chicago), are the executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary and the editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, respectively; although not academics, they are certainly humanists of profound influence whose expertise directly bears on the contents of the paper,” he added. “Furthermore, we spoke with dozens of other humanists throughout the development of the project, as can be seen in our acknowledgments.”

You can read more about the researchers’ work at www.culturomics.org.

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