Broadway- News on Broadway

Just in time for a Valentine's Day treat with your sweetheart, this evening will feature live Broadway music - courtesy of professional singers and Y members Clay and Cindy Blevins and their musical colleagues - and a fabulous four-course dinner with wine.

A 20-year-old Broadway woman faces felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence.

Virginia State Police say a Broadway woman was drunk late Friday night when she crashed into a mo-ped on Va.

Heather Raffo will be joined by a group of internationally accomplished musicians for two free performances of "The Sounds of Desire: An Ensemble Cast Featuring Heather Raffo" at Squires Studio Theatre on Jan.

So what is a short play, exactly? Is it simply defined by its length? I ask because as a form it's under-discussed and under-valued. . . a fugitive form, lacking a permanent home, rarely available on the page. Yet for all that it seems to me a very good way into any writer's work ? released from the armature of plot, the playwright is compelled to invest the moment with intense theatrical energy. In those precious minutes the dramatist's toolkit of rhythm, voice and image is ruthlessly exposed. It's a place for encounters not journeys, epiphanies not ideologies. Describing the short story of which he was a master, VS Pritchett characterizes it usefully as a "glancing form of fiction (?) right for the restlessness and nervousness of contemporary life".
For the writer too, there's a different pleasure in the short form which is well caught by the American novelist Russell Banks, who speaks of the stamina necessary to pull off full-length work necessitating a kind of "bourgeois" commitment; whereas the short story or play, is a place to experiment with form and defect from territory, where writing can be enjoyed for its own sake.

So why is the fragment so rarely seen and, like the short story, deemed commercial poison? Well, I would be the first to admit that I wouldn't venture out simply for Come and Go by Beckett ? my bourgeois need for an uneven evening's entertainment rather than ten minutes of perfection is probably not uncommon. Yes, you can round up a miscellany of works under the umbrella of one event. But as a mode of theatre-going the sheer effort required in investing in multiple disconnected narratives can take its toll ? not least because intensity is integral to the form and back-to-back intensity can pall.

When it was founded in 1946, the Arts Council could justify its activities in its own terms: it was there to widen access to the arts throughout the country, as well as to maintain and develop national arts institutions in the capital. Behind the latter policy lay a theory of artistic value that you could call patrician: art's purpose as ennobling, its realm the nation, its organisational form the institution, its repertoire the established canon and works aspiring to join it. In this the council was seeking to reverse a rising tide of populism (art's role as entertainment, its realm the marketplace, its form the business, its audience mass), a goal summed up in the founding chairman John Maynard Keynes's ringing declaration: "Death to Hollywood."

Over the following 30 years, this view of the value of the arts came under attack, not from the market place but from artists who were artistically and often politically oppositional. In the theatre in the late 1950s, on the BBC in the early to mid 1960s, and pretty much everywhere from 1968, patrician arts institutions were challenged and in many cases transformed by those who believed the arts weren't there to elevate or divert, but to provoke.

What both the patrician and the provocative shared was a primary concern for the people making the art. During the 80s, in the arts as in so many other spheres of life, Margaret Thatcher sought to shift power from the producer to the consumer, using the market to disempower the provocative (from political theatre groups to the high avant garde) in favour of the populist. This was seen most clearly in the cluster of forms that defined the cultural 80s.[Playgoer note: think mega-musicals.] Popular in form and patrician in content, the heritage industry was cultural Thatcherism, promoting (as the then secretary of state for national heritage, Virginia Bottomley, put it in May 1996) "our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade".

In this context, the major justification for government arts funding became its contribution both to that trade and to trade in general, a case based on the mounting evidence of the economic value of the arts to the so-called leisure industries

One frequent argument for funding the arts is their role in promoting continuity with the past, community cohesion and a sense of national pride. In fact, of course, British theatre in particular has been subverting such notions ever since the emergence of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Joan Littlewood nearly 60 years ago. It is this provocative mission that sets the arts apart from the other creative industries with which they are too easily lumped (by government and opposition alike). It is not the role of advertisers, architects, antique sellers, computer game manufacturers or fashion designers to challenge the way society is run. But the arts do it all the time. As David Lan puts it, dissent is necessary to democracy, and democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which that dissent can be expressed.

On the fundamentals:
?Ask yourself the question, ?What do people want to know about a movie that they?ve never seen???

On plot:
?Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.?
On brevity:
?Watch for excess words. If there?s a shorter word, use it.?
On editors:
?Work with them for the good of the piece. Don?t have ego. Don?t compete.?
On interviewing filmmakers:
?If you?re thinking about it, ask them about it.?
On digressions:
?The longer the em dash, the weaker its impact.?
On taste:
?Always ask yourself why you like what you like.?
On bad movies:
?Vent your spleen. In criticism, it?s better to be angry than depressed.?
On the competition:
?Never read other critics? reviews. They cloud your judgment.?
On deadlines:
?Never miss a deadline.?