artsJournal

"So Christmas is once again lurching towards us with all the stealth of a Salvation Army band and as I look around at what the arts have to offer I'm left with the same nagging question I have every year - how do we manage to make art about Christmas so boring?"...

"Playwright Michael Yawney spent the last three years crafting a comedy about Anita Bryant's 1977 campaign to repeal Miami-Dade County's first gay-rights ordinance. Yawney never expected that on the eve of its world premiere Thursday in Miami, 1,000 Homosexuals would be so relevant."...

"World-renowned theatre maker Robert Lepage is to join forces with dancer Sylvie Guillem and choreographer Russell Maliphant to create a new show called Eonnagata, which will be staged as part of Sadler's Wells spring 2009 season. The story recounts the life of Charles de Beaumont, a member of French King Louis XV's spy network, the King's Secret, whose true gender was a constant source of speculation right up to his death."...

"In Imagine This, a new musical about the Holocaust, a group of actors in the Warsaw ghetto stage a play. The play is about a community of Jews in Masada who, in AD73, are surrounded by the Roman army and, rather than surrender, choose to kill themselves en masse."...

"Gershwin's tune-laden slice of life in the Charleston slum known as Catfish Row (based on Heyward's 1925 novel and the subsequent play) did not flinch from confronting issues of race and class. Those issues - grinding poverty, domestic abuse, racist bigotry, crime, drugs and prostitution - remain very much with us today."...

"In a surprise move, the board of directors of the Carbonell Awards has voted to suspend the program for 2009. A ceremony honoring the best work in South Florida theater during 2008 will still take place in the spring, but no productions that open during 2009 will be given awards."...

"While everyone suspects that there might be a handful of empty Broadway theaters in the spring, at the moment the big theaters are still largely booked, and most nonprofits have finished their fund-raising for this fiscal year. More significant, though, is what happens when the next fall season comes round. Those in the industry wonder not only about empty theaters, but also about the effect on the stream of creative work."...

"While everyone suspects that there might be a handful of empty Broadway theaters in the spring, at the moment the big theaters are still largely booked, and most nonprofits have finished their fund-raising for this fiscal year. More significant, though, is what happens when the next fall season comes round. Those in the industry wonder not only about empty theaters, but also about the effect on the stream of creative work."...

Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony for playing the hefty, happy Tracy Turnblad in the John Waters-inspired musical, is returning to the show Dec. 9. Harvey Fierstein, who drew raves as Tracy's very downscale mother, came back earlier this month....

The Yalta dacha where Chekhov wrote "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard" is plagued by mold and a leaky roof. A campaign to save it is under way, sans state aid. As the head of the campaign explained, "The Russian government didn't want to fund the restoration because the house is in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian government didn't want to pay to promote a Russian author."...

"There is an obvious paucity of right-leaning voices in theater. There are many reasons for this, but it is to the detriment, I believe, of the community as a whole. My own political posture leans distinctly to the left. But we will not, in the long run, benefit from casting out all those whose opinions offend us. And there are sure to be many tests of tolerance ahead."...

"The institutions have grown large, metastasized, at the expense of the actors, the designers - the artists. The weekly acting salary at the big Seattle theatres was between $700 and $900 back in the early nineties. The price range for acting at the big theatres in 2008 is . . . between $700 and $900. It hasn't changed in over fifteen years!"...

The UK group doesn't like the plan to give away free theatre tickets to professional productions. "If... the Arts Council really want to encourage young people to participate in the arts, they should be focusing on funding those very young people to participate at a local level in the first instance as opposed to issuing such gimmicks."...

"Billy Elliot, which tells the story of a boy from a working-class city in England who wants to be a ballet dancer, is shaping up to be the one bright spot on an otherwise gloomy-looking Broadway, where shows are crashing with the speed of emerging markets in Southeast Asia."...

"Having already destroyed one art form - alternative pop music - Morrissey's grandchildren, the shock troops of self-obsessed and willfully underachieving middle-class miserabilism, are setting out to destroy another, the musical. They must be stopped."...

"Patti LuPone is irreplaceable. So say the producers of Broadway's Gypsy, who yesterday announced they would shutter the hit musical revival on March 1, 2009, rather than try to replace its bold, bossy and critically beloved leading lady."...

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, once a big Broadway-style extravaganza, is coming to London in an admired small-scale production from the Watermill Theatre in West Berkshire, where it completely sold out....

"The artistic director of the California Musical Theater, a major nonprofit producing company here in the state's capital, resigned on Wednesday in the face of growing outrage over his support for a ballot measure this month that outlawed same-sex marriage in California." Scott Eckern donated $1,000 to the campaign for Proposition 8....

The London theater company Punchdrunk has teamed up with HP Labs, gaming company Hide & Seek, and web design firm Seeper to create Last Will, a "hybrid experience" for two on-site players, one in a "physical realm" and the other in a "virtual realm."...

The Weinstein brothers have acquired the film rights to Tracy Letts's Tony-winning drama about a ferociously dysfunctional Oklahoma family. Actresses are already lobbying for the juicy female roles in the film, which is planned for 2011 release....