text:
On Friday, June 27, 2003, the musicians of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra gathered at Baghdad's Ribat Recital Hall to write a new chapter in their country's musical history. Their concert—the orchestra's first of the post-Saddam Hussein era—was more than a mere performance, however. It represented a triumph over years of political censorship, financial adversity, and official neglect. As the musicians played, many in the audience sang along to the song "My Nation," which had been banned by the former dictator: "My nation, my nation, am I going to see you safe, blessed, victorious, and esteemed?" Given the tribulations of 2003, they could just as easily have been singing about classical music in general.
While the Iraqi orchestra's performance was not, arguably, one of the musical high points of 2003, it was emblematic of a year in which classical music was confronted by a range of forces—war, plunging economies, labour strife, a mysterious epidemic—that for the most part overshadowed artistic events and achievements and at times threatened to overwhelm the music and those who made it. In the persons of those Iraqi musicians, whose salaries had been cut to $20 per month, the concert symbolized the way classical music itself somehow managed to persevere and play on.
In North America many classical musicians considered themselves fortunate simply to keep their jobs as orchestras and other musical institutions—their budgets and endowments eviscerated by the ailing economy and flagging sponsorship—plunged into debt. Several orchestras, including the San Antonio (Texas) Symphony, the Colorado Springs (Colo.) Symphony, and the Florida Philharmonic, were forced into bankruptcy, while those in St. Paul (Minn.), Seattle (Wash.), St. Louis (Mo.), and Pittsburgh (Pa.), among others, posted substantial deficits. Philadelphia's Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts announced a deficit of $3.8 million in its first full year of operations.
Elsewhere the economic crunch was felt as well. In Australia, Sydney-based World Orchestras, Ltd., which had brought international ensembles to concert halls Down Under, announced that it was canceling its 2004 season owing to an $A 800,000 (about U.S.$580,000) shortfall. Edinburgh's Scottish Opera contemplated staff cuts and a reduced schedule because of its financial problems, while London's English National Opera threatened at one point to become a part-time company because of its monetary woes.
Musically, France was hardest hit of all. When the government announced that it would cut the benefits offered to the country's entertainment workers, strikes erupted that rocked France's popular and lucrative summer festival season. Prestigious festivals such as those in Aix-en-Provence and Avignon were forced to close, and scores of other events were disrupted or curtailed.
Compounding the economic woes, the outbreak of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in Asia adversely affected musical activities on the Pacific Rim. Taiwan's 2003 Contemporary Festival was canceled because of the outbreak; the Hong Kong Philharmonic postponed several concerts; the third Beijing International Piano Competition was delayed; and the Arts in May series at Singapore's Esplanade performing arts complex was called off.
Amid all of these calamities, of course, there was war. When Australians awoke on a sunny day in March, they were confronted by the sight of their beloved Sydney Opera House defaced by 3-m (10-ft)-high letters spelling out the phrase "No War" on one of its curved white fins. The vandalism was the work of a British scientist and an Australian man who were protesting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In April a concert by Riccardo Muti and La Scala's Philharmonic Orchestra at Rome's La Sapienza University was disrupted by antiwar protesters. A month earlier officials of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra had threatened to dismiss conductor Gerd Albrecht for antiwar remarks he made from the podium during a concert. When controversial director Peter Sellars announced in May that he would stage an antiwar production of Mozart's Idomeneo at the U.K.'s Glyndebourne Festival, several corporate sponsors of the event threatened to withdraw their support. Public opinion was divided again in the fall when British composer Keith Burstein announced that his opera Manifest Destiny—a musical study of the mind and motivations of a terrorist—would premier at London's Cockpit Theatre.
Other voices—less clamorous, more conciliatory—were heard as well. In August the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—organized by Israeli conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian American critic Edward Said (see Obituaries) and comprising Israeli and Arab musicians—gave its first concert in an Arab country, in Rabat, Mor. Two days later the "peace orchestra," whose purpose was to foster an environment of reconciliation between Arabs and Jews, made its French debut in Menton.
Even the daunting spectre of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was musically addressed in more contemplative ways. At New York's "88 Keys: A Celebration of the Piano" festival in September, composer Daniele Lombardi presented the debut of his tribute to the 9/11 victims with his Threnodia for 21 pianos. In April composer John Adams's 9/11 commemoration, On the Transmigration of Souls (which debuted in 2002), was honoured with the Pulitzer Prize.
Given the tumultuous nature of the musical year, various controversies that came along paled in comparison, like brush fires next to a California wildfire. The most contentious of these flared in June when the New York Philharmonic announced that it would leave its home at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall and merge with its former musical home, Carnegie Hall. Seemingly left in the lurch, officials at Lincoln Center invoked its lease with the orchestra (which ran through 2011), threatening legal action that later in the year forced a cancellation of the proposed merger. Meanwhile, in France a cellist with the Strasbourg Philharmonic refused to play works by Richard Wagner—sometimes referred to as "Hitler's favourite composer"—because he felt "the presence of the devil" in the music. French pianist François-René Duchable announced that he would perform three final concerts in which he would, respectively, dump a piano into a lake, set fire to his recital suit, and blow up another piano to make the point that "the concert is dead." In Rio de Janeiro opera director Gerald Thomas reacted to boos following his staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which featured explicit sexual scenes and references to Nazis, by dropping his pants and "mooning" the audience.
All of the hoopla was overshadowed at various points during the year by the deaths of several of classical music's esteemed figures. In February the grand old man of the U.S.'s West Coast school, composer Lou Harrison, died at age 85. In Italy provocative avant-garde composer Luciano Berio died in May at age 77, and pianist Eugene Istomin died in October at the same age. Lithuanian composer Antanas Rekasius, whose works were infused with an irrepressible sense of humour and the absurd, died at age 75.
The musical year, however, was not without its high points as well. Ironically, at a time when many orchestras and institutions were struggling to get by, 2003 was marked by the opening of dazzling new concert halls in various cities. The jewel, by many accounts, was the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. With its curving, organic design, the hall—the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—was a sonic and visual tour de force. In August the opera-crazed populace of Seattle celebrated the opening of Marion Oliver McCaw Hall to general acclaim; a month later New Yorkers were treated to an intimate new performance space, the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall, in the lower level of Carnegie Hall. Members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra were so pleased with their new Max M. Fisher Music Center that they played what was dubbed a "Hard Hat Concert" in October for the construction workers who had built it.
To attract new audiences to their halls, the administrators and marketing departments of various orchestras and opera houses devised imaginative ploys. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra unveiled a series of lively television ads to promote itself, while the London Symphony Orchestra began marketing its recordings—literally—in a chain of U.K. grocery stores. In September, Berlin's Komische Oper staged what it claimed was the world's first "singles party" at an opera performance, in which audience members were encouraged to write flirtatious notes to each other during intermission. London's Royal Opera House devised a promotional campaign in conjunction with the city's top dance club, the Ministry of Sound, in which a set of promotional DayGlo postcards bearing the words dance music, soul music, or house music advertised performances of the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera. Most ingenious of all, perhaps, the Minnesota Orchestra gave away "bobble-head" dolls of its new music director, Osmo Vänskä (one of many new faces on the podiums of major orchestras during the year—see Sidebar), featuring a swinging bobble arm that conducted a recorded sample of Sibelius's Finlandia.
Performances themselves often lived up to these promotional stratagems. The Washington (D.C.) Opera's September production of Johann Strauss, Jr.'s Die Fledermaus featured cameo nonsinging appearances by U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer. Another legal motif was offered by Reno's Nevada Opera in July when it staged a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Trial by Jury in a real courtroom, with District Judge Peter Breen presiding. In October the Apartment House theatre in Dresden, Ger., presented the world premiere of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe's XXX Live Nude Girls, which featured two naked Barbie dolls (manipulated by a puppeteer and videocast to an onstage screen) backed by offstage musicians and singers. In South Korea a lavish $5.3 million production of Verdi's Aida was presented at Seoul's Olympic Stadium with a vast stage set that included a herd of camels.
Along with the onstage antics were sublime moments as well. In December world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra in the shadow of the 800-year-old Cambodian temple at Angkor Wat in a benefit for a charity that was bringing water to that country's underdeveloped villages. In August legendary pianist Alicia de Larrocha, known as "the first lady of the Mostly Mozart Festival," made her farewell appearance at that Lincoln Center event, capping a tenure that encompassed 80 performances over a 32-year period.
Where it counted most, in the creation and introduction of new works that would ensure the continuation of the classical music tradition itself, 2003 did not disappoint. The year saw the premieres of English composer John Tavener's seven-hour choral work The Veil of the Temple, Danish composer Poul Ruders's opera The Handmaid's Tale, Chinese American composer Bright Sheng's opera, Madame Mao, American composer Deborah Drattell's opera Nicholas and Alexandra, and English composer Anthony Payne's new song cycle based on poems by Edward Thomas, among numerous others. Jonathan Mills's opera The Eternity Man paid tribute to Arthur Stace, who walked the streets of Sydney for 37 years chalking the word eternity on sidewalks.
The year was also endowed with a wide range of new recordings that illuminated the genius of the past while underscoring the vast musical palette that was now a part of the classical music world. Early music was the focus of The Essential Tallis Scholars (Gimell), which celebrated 30 years of recordings by the group that was essential in fostering the rebirth of Renaissance music. On Extempore II (Harmonia Mundi), an equally important early music ensemble, the Orlando Consort, took a different tack, combining medieval musical motifs with the inspired improvisations of the jazz group Perfect Houseplants. Hilary Hahn delivered a warmly human reading on Bach Concertos for Deutsche Grammophon, while violinist Nigel Kennedy teamed with Poland's Kroke Band to explore the myriad forms of Eastern European music. In a touching moment Lang Lang, one of the most promising pianists of his generation, revisited the work that had catapulted him to international acclaim in 1999, recording Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Finally, as the tumultuous year drew to a close, a fitting denouement unfolded on December 9 when the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra—having rehearsed for the grand moment amid bursting bombs and 40.5 °C (105 °F) heat—appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. As they played, perhaps the musicians' thoughts turned to that performance in Baghdad earlier in the year when their conductor, Abdel Razak al-Azawi, had said, "Music is great at taking people away from their pain and suffering."
In 2003 the collapse of the pop-album market gave the blues to the jazz-record business. The five major record companies—Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Warners—concentrated on issuing popular product and severely scaled down their jazz output; the majority of new jazz CDs were produced by many small independent labels. Hard-pressed retail chain stores that were required to turn over their stock every few months carried few independent-label jazz CDs; they paid their major suppliers' bills first and left small distributors unpaid. CD buyers were forced to frequent jazz specialty stores and search Internet outlets for jazz albums.
The number of jazz albums proliferated, but pressings were typically in small quantities; even important independent labels such as Delmark and Hatology often made first pressings of only 2,000 or fewer copies for new releases. As for reissues, the flow of older jazz packages ground to a near halt, owing to competition from Europe, which had copyright laws that typically protected recordings for only 50 years, compared with 95 years in the U.S. In the 1990s small European labels had begun issuing music that had been recorded by both major and independent labels from the early jazz and swing eras, and in recent years they began issuing those from the bop era as well. These included complete collections of major artists but also those of valuable lesser-known figures. Worst of all, the production of reissues in the U.S. was expensive and time-consuming. Shortly after many reissue sets appeared in the U.S., European "pirates" copied the packages and sold them over the Internet for a fraction of the American price.
Live jazz continued to thrive in clubs, concerts, and festivals. The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho, continued despite the death in 2002 of its namesake; Los Angeles hosted the 25th Playboy Jazz Festival; and the San Francisco Jazz Festival, a midautumn event, offered 29 concerts, curated by tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, who also had directed the San Francisco Spring Season. The 50th anniversary of Delmark Records, which boasted 400 albums in its catalog, was celebrated at both the Chicago jazz and blues festivals. Ornette Coleman made rare appearances with his swinging trio and quartet at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. After a decade's absence saxophonist Joseph Jarman rejoined the Art Ensemble of Chicago and performed on the group's album The Meeting. The Big Three Palladium Orchestra, led by Tito Puente, Jr., Tito Rodriguez, Jr. and Mario Grillo, son of Machito—sons of Latin jazz greats—and including musicians from their fathers' historic bands, played a brief concert tour.
The Marsalis Family—a sextet led by pianist Ellis, with his sons Wynton (trumpet), Branford (saxophones), Delfeayo (trombone), and Jason (drums) and bassist Reginald Veal—played an eight-city tour. After he had spent more than 20 years with Columbia Records, Wynton was dropped by that label, and he signed with Blue Note; his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra was joined by Spanish pianist Chano Domínguez's combo for a flamenco-jazz fusion concert in February. Branford's Marsalis Music label issued his Romare Bearden Revealed CD to coincide with a retrospective of Bearden's paintings that was being held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Marsalis Music also released the CD Other Hours, featuring Harry Connick, Jr., who did not sing but played piano. Innovative composer-pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi offered the album Hiroshima—Rising from the Abyss. Then, after a farewell concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City, she dissolved her 30-year-old big band. The year's newest jazz vocal star was singer-pianist Peter Cincotti, a 19-year-old college sophomore who offered an eponymous album and toured the U.S. Singer-pianist Norah Jones, the promising new talent of 2002, and her works "Don't Know Why" and Come Away With Me picked up eight Grammy Awards in 2003. (See Biographies.)
Following two years and $1.6 million in renovations, the home in Queens, New York City, of trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, was restored to its condition at the time the couple had lived there. Its opening to the public as a museum was celebrated in October by big and small jazz bands and was accompanied by the publication of the book Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo, written by museum director Michael Cogswell. Executive Producer Martin Scorsese joined six other noted film directors—including, significantly, only one African American—and created The Blues, a seven-film PBS series that offered random perspectives on the African American idiom and its effects on rock and jazz.
The growing ensemble mastery of Trio 3 (Oliver Lake, alto saxophone; Reggie Workman, bass; Andrew Cyrille, drums) was heard in its CD Open Ideas. Other important albums included Cloth by Oliver Lake Big Band, the reissue of Collective Calls by Evan Parker (saxophone) and Paul Lytton (drums), Cecil Taylor's solo The Willisau Concert, and Nailed by a quartet that included Taylor and Parker. Hyena Records began issuing recordings from Thelonious Monk's personal collection, beginning with Monk in Paris: Live at the Olympia from 1965.
Among the notable deaths during the year were those of alto saxophonist-composer Benny Carter, singer Nina Simone, conguero Mongo Santamaria, flutist Herbie Mann, and salsa star Celia Cruz. (See Obituaries.) Other losses to jazz included the deaths of saxophonists Allen Eager, Teddy Edwards, Frank Lowe, and Bill Perkins, cornetist Ruby Braff, bassist Chubby Jackson, trombonist Jimmy Knepper, Australian traditional jazz composer David Dallwitz, Dutch bandleader Marcel Thielemans, and Down Beat magazine owner Jack Maher.
The year 2003 was a classic one for exceptionally varied new music from Mali, which had produced a number of remarkable musicians over the years. In January many of the country's finest singers, along with a handful of supporters from the West, assembled near the city of Timbuktu for a festival in the Sahara. The resulting CD, Festival in the Desert, was hailed as one of the best live World Music recordings of all time and featured rousing appearances from Ali Farka Toure and his disciple Afel Bocoum, along with local Tuareg tribesmen, all demonstrating the links that exist between the "desert blues" styles of Mali and the black music of the U.S. The album included an impressive track from Oumou Sangaré, the country's finest female diva and a champion of women's rights; during the year she also released Oumou, a powerful, largely retrospective album. Other stirring performances from the desert concert came from the French band Lo'Jo and from the only visiting Western superstar, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame. Accomplished Malian artist Rokia Traoré, who was based in France, had a good year. She used traditional African instruments such as the n'goni and balafon on her delicate, gently rousing new album Bowmboi, in which she set out to "use classical Malian instruments in a new way" and demonstrate a songwriting style that mixed influences from Africa, Europe, and India. She was joined on two tracks by the Kronos Quartet, a highly inventive American string ensemble.
Mali's finest guitarist, Djelimady Tounkara, toured with his legendary group the Super Rail Band, alongside their rivals from the 1960s and '70s, the Guinean band Bembeya Jazz. Meanwhile, Salif Keita, Mali's leading singer, collaborated with the New York-based Cameroonian singer and bass player Richard Bona on his highly eclectic album Munia, which mixed African, jazz, and pop influences.
There was another strong Africa-U.S. collaboration on the Abyssinia Infinite project, an album in which Ethiopian singer Ejigayehu Shibabaw, better known simply as Gigi, joined the producer and musician Bill Laswell to rework Ethiopian songs, using instrumentation from across Africa, Asia, and the West.
Among the other African female singers producing notable albums were Mauritanian artist Malouma, who mixed Arabic influences with blues as well as rousing rhythm and blues, and French-based Algerian singer Souad Massi, whose album Deb ("Heartbroken") showed her moving from North African influences to stirring pop anthems with a Spanish flamenco edge.
Portuguese fado singer Mariza, whose extraordinary looks and even more extraordinary intense and dramatic singing established her position as a global star, produced a fine new album, Fado Curvo. (See Biographies.) Kristi Stassinopoulou's The Secret of the Rocks, a best-selling album in Greece, mixed local folk influences with everything from rock to African styles. In Uzbekistan the young folk singer and pop star Sevara Nazarkhan again mixed traditional styles with Western instrumentation on her charming, gently mournful album Yol Bolsin. The success of all of these artists outside their own territories showed the growing interest among European and American audiences for unexpected, different styles of music. Other unlikely outsiders who made an impact included Bic Runga, a part-Chinese, part-Maori singer from New Zealand, and Iraqi singer Ilham al-Madfi. Once known as the "Beatle of Baghdad," he spent much of the Saddam Hussein era living in exile and became a major star in the Arab world. His concert in London in 2003 proved that he was on his way to becoming Iraq's first crossover World Music celebrity.
In the U.K. the music scene was also enlivened by the growth in global-fusion styles. The band Oi Va Voi mixed modern dance beats with Jewish klezmer songs from Eastern Europe. Terry Hall (former lead singer with the Specials) mixed hip-hop, Roma (Gypsy), and Asian influences in his collaboration with Mushtaq on the album The Hour of Two Lights. The Mercury Music Prize for 2003, extolling the best in British music, was won by Dizzee Rascal, a 19-year-old garage-style rapper who was praised for his witty, honest lyrics about the everyday lives of young people residing in the east end of London.
In early October 2003, for the first time in the 45-year history of Billboard's Hot 100 chart, all entries in the top 10 were by black artists. Mainstream top 40 radio stations that had featured teen pop groups *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys on their playlists three years earlier, turned increasingly to rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop tracks. Some observers called the trend a blurring of colour lines and proof that black music had been accepted fully as part of mainstream culture.
Hip-hop artist 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) sold 1.6 million copies of his CD Get Rich or Die Tryin' during the two weeks after its February release. Mentored by the late rapper Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C., 50 Cent signed to Eminem's Shady Records and to Dr. Dre's Aftermath Records in a joint venture. The placement of two tracks on Eminem's 2002 movie sound track 8 Mile helped build anticipation for 50 Cent's 2003 CD release. Hits such as "P.I.M.P.," "In Da Club," "21 Questions," and, with Lil' Kim, "Magic Stick" made the rapper one of the most successful artists of the year. Atlanta, Ga.-based black duo Outkast—Big Boi (Antwan Patton) and Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin)—drew critical plaudits for a double CD, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Big Boi created the Speakerboxxx disc, closer to Outkast's previous hip-hop style, while Andre 3000 crafted The Love Below, on which he sang in a funky style often reminiscent of Prince. By November the set was certified four-times platinum, for shipments of four million units.
The Love Below included a guest appearance by singer-songwriter Norah Jones (see Biographies), who with her works won eight Grammy Awards in February. Bruce Springsteen, who won three Grammys in rock categories, ended his Rising tour in October at Shea Stadium in New York City. Begun in 2002 and traveling to North American and Australian arenas in the spring and European and U.S. stadiums in the summer, the tour grossed $172.7 million during 2003. The Dixie Chicks also won three Grammys, including country album of the year. During their world tour, the trio played to capacity crowds, but they found themselves embroiled in controversy after singer Natalie Maines made a much-publicized negative comment in London about U.S. Pres. George W. Bush. The Chicks also posed nude for the cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine and engaged in a public feud with fellow country star Toby Keith. Singer Alan Jackson (see Biographies) won three awards at the Country Music Association Awards, including male vocalist of the year and entertainer of the year, and he picked up two Academy of Country Music trophies for album of the year and video of the year for "Drive." Colombian singer-songwriter Juanes had five wins at the fourth annual Latin Grammy Awards in Miami, Fla. His Un día normal was named album of the year.
Fox Television's American Idol talent-search show brought two pop singers to national prominence, North Carolinian Clay Aiken and Alabaman Ruben Studdard. Aiken's debut CD, Measure of a Man, sold 613,000 copies in its first week of release and was placed at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. Studdard's debut, Soulful, was released on December 9. Singer Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child released her first solo album, Dangerously in Love, which included the radio hits "Baby Boy" and "Crazy in Love." On the former Knowles teamed with dance-hall reggae star Sean Paul, and on the latter she worked with rapper Jay-Z.
In late December, album sales for 2003 were down 4.7% compared with 2002. Apple Computer Corp. debuted its iTunes Music Store for the Macintosh in April and sold a million songs within seven days. When Apple made the iTunes Music Store available to Microsoft Windows-based computer users in October, the company sold a million songs in three and a half days. Napster reemerged as an online music store, selling songs and subscriptions for owner Roxio. Bertelsmann AG and Sony Corp. announced in November that they had signed a nonbinding letter of intent to merge their music divisions in a joint venture, to be called Sony BMG. The merger hinged on regulatory approval in the U.S. and the European Union.
Among the deaths during the year were those of icon Johnny Cash; his wife, June Carter Cash; Sun Records founder Sam Phillips; Maurice Gibb of the BeeGees; Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers; Don Gibson; Barry White; Hank Ballard; and Warren Zevon.
The winter, spring, and summer of 2003 had their share of Broadway-inspired ballet offerings, perhaps influenced by the success of Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out, which gave Broadway its first thoroughly dance-driven show in quite some time and helped to close out 2002 with a bang. Two of the 2003 offerings were more or less duds. Early in the year New York City Ballet (NYCB) offered Peter Martins's Thou Swell, a strung-out suite of nightclub dances-cum-ballet meant to help celebrate the centenary of Richard Rodgers's birth. In the early summer Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) presented the world premiere of a rather sprawling and jumbled St. Louis Woman: A Blues Ballet, with choreography by Michael Smuin, who also reworked the scenario of the 1946 Broadway show to fit his almost-all-dancing scheme (singers appeared onstage). As with Martins's effort, which had set designs by Broadway veteran Robin Wagner and costumes by fashion designer Julius Lumsden, Smuin's collaborators included Broadway veterans Tony Walton (sets), Willa Kim (costumes), and Natasha Katz (lighting).
For Broadway-inclined ballet audiences looking for diverting entertainment, in the spring NYCB offered Christopher Wheeldon's enchanting Carnival of the Animals (set to the score by Camille Saint-Saëns). Inspired by John Lithgow's charming and poetic libretto concerning a young boy's night alone in a museum of natural history, where his dreams find the displays taking on the personalities of the people in his life, Wheeldon's work presented the visions of a schoolboy's lively imagination. With Lithgow as the ballet's beguiling narrator and precocious School of American Ballet student P.J. Verhoest playing the central figure, Carnival unfolded as a smooth sampler of music and moods, wittily designed by Jon Morrell.
Postmodernist composer John Adams, who was celebrated throughout New York City during the year, lent another pervasive theme to dance: NYCB offered Adams's Guide to Strange Places in an unmemorable and rather bland ballet by Martins; American Ballet Theatre (ABT) offered a doubleheader of an evening called HereAfter. The first act, Heaven, used Adams's large-scale choral composition Harmonium as a starting point for Natalie Weir's uninspired casual ritualistic romp, in which dancers looked as though they were dressed for a Gap ad. The second act, Earth, fared little better; it featured Stanton Welch's often foolishly finicky choreography set to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which had become wildly popular as music for theatrical accompaniment. ABT's shorter fall season offered a revival of Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire and a restaging of Frederick Ashton's classic Symphonic Variations, in preparation for the 2004 centenary of the British ballet master's birth.
Soon after his unimpressive ABT premiere, Welch marked the beginning of his artistic directorship at Houston (Texas) Ballet in the fall season. He took over from Ben Stevenson, who, after being feted for his effective years of service in Houston, moved on to act as artistic adviser to the Texas Ballet Theater (formerly the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet). Welch's opening program for Houston Ballet included his own A Dance in the Garden of Mirth, as well as the world premiere of Trey McIntyre's The Shadow, inspired by tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Similar changing of the guard marked the activities of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Christopher Stowell took over the position vacated by James Canfield, starting with a New Beginnings program that featured works by George Balanchine, Kent Stowell (the director's father), Helgi Tomasson, and Paul Taylor.
After having performed for the earlier part of the year in temporary surroundings, Pacific Northwest Ballet, run by Christopher Stowell's parents (Kent Stowell and Francia Russell), inaugurated its fall season by christening a newly outfitted home theatre, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, with a new production of Swan Lake. The production, choreographed by Kent Stowell, included scenic design by the legendary Ming Cho Lee. San Francisco Ballet offered a new production of the Russian warhorse Don Quixote as well as mixed bills featuring ballets by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. During the late summer the troupe played in Edinburgh with an all-Wheeldon program that proved critically positive for the reputations of both the company and the young choreographer.
At Boston Ballet, where Mikko Nissinen was making his way after having taken over the reins in 2002, the company offered new stagings of Ashton's ever-enchanting La Fille mal gardée, Welch's Madame Butterfly, and Rudolf Nureyev's Don Quixote. Before the fall season got into gear, the company roster changed significantly. Several veteran dancers left, and two of Nissinen's new hires hailed from Ballet Nacional de Cuba—Lorna Feijóo and Havana sensation Rolando Sarabia. The Cuban company made a fall tour of the U.S., including a week at New York City's City Center, with a repertory featuring Don Quixote and Swan Lake (both productions were supervised by the troupe's legendary director, Alicia Alonso). Pennsylvania Ballet's year included presentation of the East Coast premiere of The Firebird by James Kudelka, and by year's end the troupe was kicking off its 40th-anniversary season with a first-time staging of Fancy Free. The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago put its art form not only onstage as usual but also on film with the Christmas release of The Company, Robert Altman's latest work.
During the renovation of its opera house, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., offered a number of dance events in less-usual parts of its complex. Among other events, it held an International Ballet Festival, featuring appearances by ABT, Miami (Fla.) City Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Ballet (appearing under its former name, the Kirov Ballet), the Royal Danish Ballet, and Adam Cooper and Company. At year's end, after a U.S. tour that included Las Vegas, Nev., the Mariinsky returned to help reopen the Kennedy Center's opera house with its fantastic version of The Nutcracker and its standard staging of Swan Lake. The Kennedy Center also presented the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and a bill celebrating the legacy of Paul Taylor that featured both the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Houston Ballet; the latter presented Taylor's now-classic Company B and the premiere of his newest creation, In the Beginning.
Suzanne Farrell Ballet, anticipating more eagerly than most companies the upcoming centenary of the birth of Balanchine, toured with all-Balanchine programming in the fall, climaxing at the Kennedy Center with a two-program season. The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg toured extensively in the U.S., featuring a take on the American movie classic Some Like It Hot as a cartoonish dance suite called Who's Who.
On other fronts of modern dance, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company helped christen Frank Gehry's shiny and new Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Later in the year, after wide-ranging touring, the company's continuing celebration of its 50th anniversary wrapped up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM's) annual Next Wave Festival with a premiere work specially devised by Cunningham as a collaboration with both Radiohead (see Biographies) and Sigur Rós. Mark Morris performed during his annual stint at BAM, near his own headquarters, and gave the West Coast a world premiere, All Fours (set to the music of Bela Bartok), in September.
Experimental dance had some intriguing entries in New York City, including John Jasperse's just two dancers at Dance Theater Workshop and Sarah Michelson's Shadowmann, shown as a two-part miniepic at the Kitchen and PS 122. Susan Marshall's Sleeping Beauty and Other Stories helped to fill out the Next Wave Festival. The Martha Graham Dance Company was back in business early in the year following litigation over ownership of rights to its namesake's works, but it was back in court by the fall owing to an appeal.
Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet made news as a result of its involvement in Guy Maddin's film Dracula—Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which was based on Mark Godden's ballet Dracula, performed by the Royal Winnipeg. The troupe's fall season kicked off with Godden's latest premiere, The Magic Flute. In addition to showcasing a world premiere of Tristan and Isolde by John Alleyne, artistic director of Ballet British Columbia, James Kudelka's National Ballet of Canada also offered fall programming featuring innovative work that included the director's own there, below, Dominique Dumais's one hundred words for snow, and Matjash Mrozewski's Monument. Montreal's nearly 20-year-old Gala des Étoiles went forward even as it seemed it might not, thanks to what grateful president Victor Melnikoff called a "rescue operation" headed by Boston Ballet's Nissinen, in which the dancers worked without fees. After a slump in attendance in 2002, Vancouver's third International Dance Festival showcased a wide variety of offerings that included local and well as foreign troupes.
A number of deaths occurred during the year, including those of Vera Zorina, Cholly Atkins, Bertram Ross, Janet Collins, Howard ("Sandman") Sims, and Gregory Hines. Other deaths included those of director Anne Belle, choreographers Mel Wong and Amy Sue Rosen, longtime dance educator Thalia Mara, and Muriel Topaz, a prominent figure in the field of dance notation.
The year 2003 was one of a series of commemorative years for European ballet. The 10th anniversary of the death of Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev fell in January, and the dance world looked forward to the centenary of the birth in 1904 of British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and the bicentenary of the birth in 1805 of Danish dancer and choreographer August Bournonville.
Many of the companies particularly associated with Nureyev gave special performances in tribute. The Paris Opéra Ballet mounted a program featuring several of his protégés and included the company's first performance of Ashton's Marguerite and Armand, originally made for Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. In Vienna the State Opera Ballet performed extracts from Nureyev's productions of the classics, and the Ballet of the Opéra Nationale de Bordeaux offered two programs of ballets in which Nureyev had danced. In London the National Film Theatre mounted a season of Nureyev's films and television programs, some quite familiar but others rarely seen before. The Royal Ballet also presented an evening of works associated with Nureyev, including a controversial section, arranged by Sylvie Guillem, in which dancers with the company performed some of his greatest roles in front of a large screen while filmed extracts from completely different works were shown simultaneously.
The remainder of the London season included two very successful mixed programs by English National Ballet, which introduced new works by Christopher Hampson, whose ballet Trapèze was set to newly discovered music by Sergey Prokofiev, and Michael Corder, who made Melody on the Move, a piece evoking the "wireless" age. The Royal Ballet (with Monica Mason confirmed as its director) gave a new production of The Sleeping Beauty by Nataliya Makarova—a Russianized version that split both audiences and critics between fervent admiration and passionate disapproval. The Royal Ballet season ended with a new production of Ashton's Cinderella, with Sir Anthony Dowell and Wayne Sleep appearing as the Ugly Sisters. Two dancers with the Royal Ballet—Johan Kobborg, a principal dancer, and Carlos Acosta, a guest artist—each launched a program of his own. Company colleagues joined Kobborg in Out of Denmark, which showcased classic and contemporary Danish choreography. Acosta's show, Tocororo—a Cuban Tale, premiered in Cuba before having its British premiere at Sadler's Wells; it was set in his native Cuba, and he choreographed the piece entirely by himself. The Dance Umbrella festival celebrated its 25th year of presenting contemporary dance with performances by many British companies as well as by such guest companies as those of Merce Cunningham and Stephen Petronio.
Elsewhere in the U.K., the Birmingham Royal Ballet gave the first performance of Krishna, a ballet designed to fuse Eastern and Western traditions, with choreography by kathak dancer Nahid Siddiqui; the troupe also premiered Beauty and the Beast, the latest full-length work by company director David Bintley. Northern Ballet Theatre had a popular success with David Nixon's new work, an evening-long version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. A brilliant set by Duncan Hayler featured some spectacular transformation scenes. Scottish Ballet spent the first half of the year working in the studio with new director Ashley Page and then opened the new season with a program that included the revival of Cheating, Lying and Stealing, a work originally made by Page for the Royal Ballet. Visitors to England included the National Ballet of China, the Mariinsky Ballet—which gave a week of performances at the Lowry Theatre in Salford in addition to its customary summer season in London—and the company of Boris Eifman.
Brigitte Lefèvre, director of the Paris Opéra Ballet, had a long-established tradition of producing a new full-evening ballet every season, and 2003's work was by Patrice Bart, a former étoile. Bart's La Petite Danseuse de Degas, set to specially written music by Denis Levaillant, was based on the real-life story of Degas's model, with Laetitia Pujol in the title role. Other new works during the season included Air by Saburo Teshigawara, set to a score by John Cage, and Phrases de Quatuor by Maurice Béjart, made for Manuel Legris. Angelin Preljocaj used a score by French rock group Air for a new work, Near Life Experience, for the Preljocaj Ballet. Several of the traditional summer festivals in France were curtailed or even canceled altogether as a result of the threat of strikes over changes to welfare payments for workers in the arts who were temporarily unemployed.
In Russia the Mariinsky Ballet revived two works from the Sergey Diaghilev repertoire. Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring, painstakingly re-created from contemporary source material by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, had been staged by various other companies in previous years, but this was the first time that it had ever been seen in Russia. Howard Sayette restaged Bronislava Nijinska's most famous work, Les Noces, in a reading based on that produced by Nijinska's daughter for the Oakland Ballet, which differed in several respects from the version staged by the choreographer herself for the Royal Ballet. Both ballets looked underrehearsed when they were seen in London; the Mariinsky's very heavy touring program left little time for the preparation of new work. Harald Lander's Études, made originally for the Royal Danish Ballet but later adapted for the Paris Opéra Ballet, was also added to the Mariinsky repertory. One of the company's leading ballerinas, Svetlana Zakharova, left at the end of the 2002–03 season to join the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. A long series of visiting companies appeared in a festival to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg.
The ballet of La Scala, Milan, became the first European company to add Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream to its repertory, in a new decor by Luisa Spinatelli. Director Frédéric Olivieri was attempting to revitalize the repertory of the company, which had had an unsettled recent history. William Forsythe, with only one more season left as director of the Frankfurt (Ger.) Ballet, made a new work, Decreation, a multimedia piece that, owing to its complexity and obscurity, left many of its audiences at a loss. In Switzerland, Davide Bombana staged a ballet based on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, and in Germany director Kevin O'Day showed two new works for the Mannheim Ballet.
The Peter Schaufuss Ballet gave the postponed premiere of Diana—the Princess at Holstebro in Denmark; as a prologue, Schaufuss used a short piece by Ashton, Nursery Suite, which showed imagined scenes from the childhood of Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, Princess Margaret. The Royal Danish Ballet gave the first company performances of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon, in a new decor by Mia Stensgaard, and also showed a new production of Bournonville's La Sylphide, staged by former Royal Danish dancer Nicolaj Hübbe, currently with NYCB. The Finnish National Ballet mounted a new version of the Marius Petipa classic Raymonda, which was jointly produced by Anna-Marie Holmes and ABT director Kevin McKenzie. The work was to be staged by ABT in 2004.
One of the most interesting offstage events was organized by DanceEast in Suffolk, Eng. The company's director, Assis Carreiro, gathered 25 directors of dance companies worldwide to discuss their common problems and plan for the future.
Losses to the dance world in 2003 included British conductor and composer John Lanchbery and Niels Bjørn Larsen, for many years a leading dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet.
The National Theatre, formerly the Royal National Theatre, changed its name and changed its style as Nicholas Hytner succeeded Sir Trevor Nunn as artistic director in 2003. By cutting production budgets and attracting more sponsorship, Hytner was able to initiate a season of plays in the largest of the three National auditoriums, the Olivier, for which most seats cost £10 (about $15) each and the rest no more than £25 (about $38).
Whereas the West End theatres around Shaftesbury Avenue suffered one of their worst years in memory, the National was full, buoyant, and offering the best shows in town. The Olivier season began with Hytner's own thrilling production of William Shakespeare's Henry V, with a black monarch (Adrian Lester) fighting a war on foreign soil with instant media feedback on a battery of screens and microphones. The play reflected anxieties about the initiative in Iraq while reinventing the king as a modern leader whose justifications for going to war were as important as his military resolve.
Next at the Olivier came His Girl Friday, a new stage version by American dramatist John Guare of the Howard Hawks movie, conflated with the play on which it was based, the classic newspaper comedy The Front Page. Alex Jennings and Zoë Wanamaker were a scintillating double act. Then Kenneth Branagh returned to the London stage, after an absence of 11 years, as the self-destructive antihero of David Mamet's Edmond, a blistering fable of urban dismay and disintegration that Branagh seized upon with an irresistible gusto.
If any one production defined the new era under Hytner, however, it was Jerry Springer—The Opera, in the National's second auditorium, the Lyttelton. A scabrous musical setting of the American talk show with sexual deviants and fetishists, it was backed by a full choir (the television studio audience) screaming their obscenities and complaints in the musical language of high, Handelian baroque. Most critics rated this the most sensational new musical theatre event in London in years. It was a sellout success and transferred to the West End in October.
Also in the Lyttelton, there were excellent revivals of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers (his first National commission in 1972) starring Simon Russell Beale and Essie Davis, and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, newly translated by Nicholas Wright and directed by Katie Mitchell. The sisters were played by Lorraine Ashbourne, Eve Best, and Anna Maxwell Martin, a rising new star who finished the year as the young heroine of His Dark Materials, a two-play adaptation by the prolific Wright of Philip Pullman's three cult novels.
All the year's best new plays were at the National, in the smallest auditorium, the Cottesloe. Michael Frayn followed up Copenhagen, his huge recent hit of friendship and atomic science, with an even more enjoyable and potentially commercial play, Democracy, with the unlikely setting of the German chancellor's office during Willy Brandt's tenure in the early 1970s. Roger Allam was a superb, charismatic, and slightly troubled Brandt, partnered by Conleth Hill as the East German spy who infiltrated his office and became both friend and nemesis. Once again, Frayn's regular director Michael Blakemore did a magnificent job.
Other Cottesloe successes were Nick Dear's Power—almost a companion piece to Democracy—with Robert Lindsay in dazzling form as the unscrupulous financier, Fouquet, at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV; Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen, a lively report from the East London front line of small-time crime; and Owen McCafferty's Scenes from the Big Picture, a stunning, poetic picture of a day's damage, drinking, and pain on the streets of Belfast, N.Ire., brilliantly directed by Peter Gill.
Not even the Royal Court, once the engine room of new British playwriting, could compete with that roster, although Roy Williams's Fallout was a compelling study of violent black teenagers and a policeman from their own environment trying to solve a local murder case. Terry Johnson's Hitchcock Blonde was an intriguing but seriously flawed attempt to exploit the great film director's penchant for fair ladies in the overlapping stories of the blonde body double in Psycho (a gorgeous Rosamund Pike) and an academic on a Greek island trying to decipher a lost Hitchcock movie while seducing his own assistant.
Hitchcock Blonde transferred to the West End to bolster a weak-looking drama program in the commercial sector. Sir Tom Courtenay gave a lovely performance as the poet Philip Larkin in his solo show, Pretending to Be Me. Meanwhile, three leading lights enjoyed varying degrees of success in plays by August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen: Sir Ian McKellen, partnered by Frances de la Tour, gave a magnificent performance in Strindberg's The Dance of Death; Ralph Fiennes was not at his best as Ibsen's gloomy old pastor in Brand; and Patrick Stewart was merely stolid as Ibsen's obsessive architect in The Master Builder. Dame Joan Plowright led a colourful Luigi Pirandello revival called Absolutely! (perhaps), directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and Warren Mitchell scored a triumph as Gregory Solomon, the humorous used-furniture salesman in Arthur Miller's The Price.
The musical theatre was in a state of unapologetic nostalgia. Ragtime and Thoroughly Modern Millie arrived from Broadway. Denise Van Outen shone gracefully in Tell Me on a Sunday, a rewrite of Don Black and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1982 song cycle. Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat returned too, with former Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in the lead. Toyah Willcox led a spirited revival of Calamity Jane, and the Open Air, Regent's Park, added a jolly version of Cole Porter's High Society to its staple diet of summer Shakespeare. To prove that anything goes as long as it went years ago, the 2002 Christmas treat at the National, Nunn's sumptuous revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes, replaced Nunn's other recent National hit, My Fair Lady, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in time for Christmas 2003.
One of the best Shakespeare productions of recent years was also by Nunn, in his farewell season at the National. Love's Labour's Lost, with Joseph Fiennes as Berowne, was an amazing show, redefining the romantic comedy as a remembered idyll in the Great War. Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) came close, though there was a better-than-average The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford-upon-Avon, which director Gregory Doran imaginatively paired with John Fletcher's sequel (in which Petruchio's second wife leads a sexual rebellion) The Tamer Tamed.
The RSC was eclipsed again by Mark Rylance's Globe on the South Bank. His all-male version of Richard II was a huge hit, but nothing compared to the storming brilliance of an all-female reading of The Taming of the Shrew, with Janet McTeer's piratical Petruchio exacting all sorts of revenge on the play without the need of the Fletcher sequel. The audiences flocked all summer while the RSC slumped to miserable failure in its Old Vic season; the company remained homeless in London after quitting the Barbican.
Although the RSC rallied at Stratford with a well-received Titus Andronicus, directed by former associate director Bill Alexander, the bloody early play of Shakespeare did not beg favourable comparison with previous RSC revivals and seemed old-fashioned next to Julie Taymor's weird and wonderful movie of the play starring Anthony Hopkins and Alan Cumming. David Bradley, for many years one of the most admired supporting actors in Britain, took the leading role and pursued the quiet route. He hardly raised his voice all evening.
Offstage, the RSC confusion continued, with the sudden departure, in quick succession, of the company's managing director, Chris Foy, after just three years in the job, and two other key management figures in the now widely discredited redevelopment scheme. New artistic director Michael Boyd kept a low profile all year but was keen to emphasize a return to the ideal of a permanent company. He also welcomed back Dame Judi Dench at year's end to play the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well and Sir Antony Sher to play Iago in Othello.
The Donmar Warehouse maintained standards with fine revivals of Albert Camus's Caligula (starring Michael Sheen), Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, and one of the year's pleasant surprises, John Osborne's The Hotel in Amsterdam, which featured three of Britain's outstanding new young actors. Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, and Susannah Harker revealed the juicy bile of Osborne's 1968 conversation piece in a luxury hotel, where six media types bitch and moan about an absentee film director. The play opened in the same week as a revival at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, starring three more shooting stars—Rupert Graves, Rachael Stirling (Dame Diana Rigg's daughter), and Julian Ovenden. London theatregoers could clear out their ears for the bracing linguistic vigour of both Osborne and Wilde.
The Almeida Theatre reopened after a £7 million (about $10 million) refurbishment with Natasha Richardson unforgettably claiming a role from her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, directed by—that man again—Nunn! The new Almeida retained most of the qualities of the old, with its possibility of creating epic intimacy against a bare brick wall, but the building had much-improved front-of-house and backstage facilities. The Ibsen was followed by I.D., a new and first play by Sher, who himself appeared as Demetrios Tsafendas, the parliamentary messenger in Cape Town who in 1966 assassinated South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.
In the regions the places to visit were the Sheffield Crucible, the Bristol Old Vic, the Salisbury Playhouse, and the Theatre Royal, Bath, where Sir Peter Hall staged a season of Giuseppe Manfridi, D.H. Lawrence, Noël Coward, Harold Pinter, and Shakespeare to great applause. Hall's own daughter, Rebecca Hall, was a lissome, lovely Rosalind in As You Like It. After more than 30 years, Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse, and Robert David MacDonald retired as directors of the Glasgow Citizens. Prowse bowed out with a characteristically brilliant production of Thomas Otway's late 17th-century masterpiece Venice Preserv'd.
The new regime at the Chichester Festival Theatre had a marvelous summer, mounting a Venetian season ranging from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers and Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise, with Michael Feast in scintillating form in the title role, to Desmond Barrit as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and a jaunty cabaret entitled I Caught My Death in Venice. The Edinburgh International Festival broke all box-office records, Fiona Shaw leading Peter Stein's revival of Chekhov's The Seagull. On the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, there was a superb revival of the courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men and a breakthrough performance (which later went to London) by the sensational 27-year-old Ross Noble, widely hailed as the best new British stand-up comedian since Eddie Izzard.
The Dublin Theatre Festival hosted two important premieres about artists: Brian Friel's Performances at the Gate Theatre boiled over with the obsessive love of Leos Janacek and was performed to the accompaniment of an impassioned Janacek string quartet; and Thomas Kilroy's The Shape of Metal at the Abbey explored the life and work of a sculptor and her complex relationship with her two daughters.
Playwright Tony Kushner reemerged in 2003 as a force to be reckoned with in the American theatre. During the decade since his precedent-shattering two-part epic Angels in America made its unlikely way to a berth on Broadway (where its accolades included a Pulitzer Prize, a raft of Tony Awards, and numerous other theatrical honours), Kushner's new work for the stage had been mostly minor. Although his writing output had continued unabated, and his influence was keenly felt in the often fractious debate about the role of theatre art in politics and society, it was only with the arrival in November 2003 of his first musical, Caroline, or Change—a masterful, deeply personal meditation on the civil rights era set in 1963 in his own home town of Lake Charles, La.—and the miniseries-style TV debut a few weeks later of HBO's lavish, star-studded six-hour film of Angels, directed by Mike Nichols, that Kushner found himself once again in the full glare of national attention.
Caroline, or Change, which had its premiere at the Public Theatre in New York City in a fluid staging by director George C. Wolfe, was a departure for Kushner in both its chamber-musical form and its near-autobiographical content. Through the lens of the relationship between an eight-year-old Jewish boy and his family's unhappy black maid (the Caroline of the title), Kushner and his collaborator, composer Jeanine Tesori, illuminated a cluster of interlocking themes: the dynamics of dysfunctional families, the corrupting influence of money, the nation's grief over the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy, and the promise of social transformation that suffused the early 1960s. At year's end it seemed likely that Caroline, buoyed by mostly positive reviews, would follow in the footsteps of Angels by transferring to a Broadway house—and that, both in theatre circles and among a wider public exposed to Angels in America on television, Kushner's preeminence among American theatre writers would stand confirmed.
In addition to Caroline's Tesori, another member of the post-Stephen Sondheim generation of composers launched a new work destined to have wide impact. Composer-lyricist Adam Guettel, the grandson of Richard Rodgers and author of the critically lauded Floyd Collins, joined forces with playwright Craig Lucas to adapt Elizabeth Spencer's short novel The Light in the Piazza into a full-scale musical drama. The tale of an innocent young American woman and her wealthy, protective mother on holiday in Florence in 1953 involves psychological intricacies—unbeknownst to her dashing Italian suitor, the 26-year-old daughter's mental development was halted by a childhood accident—as well as large-scale, almost cinematic scenes of Florentine life. Following productions in Seattle (Wash.) and Chicago, Piazza was certain to have life in New York City and beyond, thanks particularly to Guettel's radiant, lushly harmonic score.
On the nonmusical front, important premieres included Gem of the Ocean, the penultimate entry in August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle chronicling the African American experience in the 20th-century U.S. The drama, set in 1904 Pittsburgh, Pa., played in Chicago and Los Angeles, where Phylicia Rashad gave a soaring performance as the psychic Aunt Ester. Other Wilson plays—including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which ran briefly on Broadway with Whoopi Goldberg in the lead—continued to be widely produced across the nation.
The year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to a self-consciously poetic and idiosyncratic play by Cuban-born Nilo Cruz called Anna in the Tropics, which was first produced at the tiny New Theatre of Coral Gables, Fla., and then widely mounted across the country. By year's end the play, which probed the lives and loves of a family of Depression-era cigar-factory workers, had advanced to Broadway in a somewhat stolid production featuring television actor Jimmy Smits. The other most widely produced works of the year were Canadian writer Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy, a three-character play about the theatre's effect on a pair of Ontario farmers; David Auburn's mathematics-flavoured family drama Proof; Suzan-Lori Parks's brutal two-hander Topdog/Underdog; and Edward Albee's 2002 Tony Award-winning seriocomic foray into bestiality, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? The biggest winners at the Tony Awards ceremony in June were the campy musical Hairspray, which won eight awards, including one for star Harvey Fierstein (see Biographies), and Richard Greenberg's gay baseball drama Take Me Out, which collected three Tonys.
In some cases what did not happen on American stages seemed as notable as what did. Among the high-visibility cancellations in 2003 were a production at New York's Public Theater of the long-in-development John Kander and Fred Ebb musical The Visit, based on the durable Friedrich Dürrenmatt drama, and a New York City engagement of the long-awaited (and frequently renamed) Sondheim musical Bounce. The latter work, a vaudeville based on minor historical figures and the first new Sondheim work in nine years, was criticized in its Goodman Theatre of Chicago production for Hal Prince's cartoonish direction and failed to inspire the necessary confidence for a move to New York City.
Not unexpectedly, given the stagnant U.S. economy, funding for the arts in general and nonprofit theatre in particular continued to erode in 2003. Local and city funding (which had dropped by 44% in 2002) declined even further, the number of corporate donors fell, and foundation funding slipped as well. Individual contributions to theatre, by contrast, rallied to cover an increasing percentage of expenses. The overall downturn forced the closure of several organizations, including the highly visible A.S.K. Theater Projects of Los Angeles, which shut its doors in September after 14 years of theatrical-support activities.
Still, under the radar—in storefronts, basements, and makeshift spaces—small-scale alternative and experimental theatre seemed to be thriving. On both coasts, in New York City and Los Angeles, enormous fringe theatre festivals provided outlets for young artists and adventurous projects. Variety reported that New York's seventh annual Fringe Festival sold 50,000 tickets to its 200 shows.
In Canada fear of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) took a toll on the country's two major theatre festivals in Ontario. Both the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake and the half-century-old Stratford Festival (which relied on American audiences for some 40–50% of their attendance) faced sharp declines in sales at their late-May openings. Montreal's Festival de Théâtre des Amériques fared considerably better the following month, earning international attention for its remounting, 16 years after its premiere, of Robert Lepage's brilliant six-hour epic of Canadian history, La Trilogie des dragons. Staged in a disused railway repair shop on the city's outskirts, the production reaffirmed director-actor Lepage's mastery of stage imagery and created a thrilling sense of theatrical event.
Among notable Canadian productions of the year was the commercial restaging, for an extended run, of Djanet Sears's The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre Theatre. Sears, the highest-profile black theatre artist in Toronto and perhaps in all of Canada, staged her own history-hopping play with a vibrant singing and dancing chorus, who were said to represent the heroine's ancestors.
Those passing from the scene included actor, director, and Open Theatre founder Joseph Chaikin and playwright John Henry Redwood. Others deaths included those of theatre and film director Elia Kazan; dancer-actor Gregory Hines; cartoonist Al Hirschfeld; British stage designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch; actor Hume Cronyn; and playwrights Herb Gardner and Paul Zindel.
In terms of box office, the year 2003 was dominated by two concluding trilogies. The 200-minute The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King completed the cycle based on J.R.R. Tolkien's visionary epic. Directed by Peter Jackson (see Biographies) and filmed mostly in his native New Zealand, the movie triumphed as a result not only of the careful attention paid to its literary origins but also of the strategy of shooting all the parts together. By contrast, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which concluded the trilogy devised by the brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, showed a formula overextended—though still a cunning amalgam of special effects, box-office stars, martial arts, stylish costumes, eroticism, and windy utterances that might be mistaken for mystical philosophy.
Nautical spectacles also won favour at the box office. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, directed by Gore Verbinski and starring superstars Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush, was a lusty, if overlong, pirate yarn based on a ride at Disney World. A shade more serious was Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on the novels of Patrick O'Brian. One of the year's more costly films at upwards of $150 million, it was a painstaking and dramatic evocation of life aboard a British naval vessel during the Napoleonic wars.
Other veteran filmmakers were prominently at work in 2003. In Anything Else, Woody Allen returned to his very distinctive version of life in New York City. Intolerable Cruelty, by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, centred on a venomously comic confrontation between an invincible lawyer and a scheming beauty. Both Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood chose to make films in the classic manner, Costner with the western Open Range, and Eastwood with an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel Mystic River. Robert Altman, always fascinated by the processes of artistic creation, examined the structure of a ballet troupe in The Company. Oliver Stone's Comandante was a very human and unexpected documentary portrait of Fidel Castro. Stone had less luck in his effort to make a film portrait of Yasir Arafat; the documentary's title Persona Non Grata reflected his own failure to get an interview with the Palestinian leader.
The career of the Taiwanese-born Ang Lee took another surprising turn when his Hulk transformed a comic-book story into an intelligent and literate investigation of character and identity. Few of the year's other remakes and spin-offs risked any such pretensions. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines followed its old formulas with its original star Arnold Schwarzenegger (see Biographies), though with a new director, Jonathan Mostow. Marcus Nispel directed an unnecessary and ineffective remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Occasionally a remake—such as F. Gary Gray's update of the 1969 The Italian Job or the sleek and sexy Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle from the director known only as McG—outclassed its origins.
The Cannes Palme d'Or garnered by Gus Van Sant's Elephant might seem excessive for a film that barely skirted exploitation in its dramatization of the Columbine student shootings. Other films drawn from real events included Roger Spottiswoode's political comedy-drama Spinning Boris, based on the true story of the American advisers hired to help with Boris Yeltsin's 1996 reelection campaign.
A number of films revealed Hollywood's growing fascination with East Asia and its flourishing cinema cultures. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was an anthology of memories of old martial arts movies. In Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise played an American soldier who goes to Japan in 1874 to train the Imperial army in the use of modern weapons. There were amusing cross-cultural references too in Shanghai Knights, David Dobkin's sequel to Shanghai Noon (2000), in which Jackie Chan, an Imperial guard in the Forbidden City, becomes sheriff of Carson City.
Notable critical successes of the year included Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, a deft, modish romantic comedy about an encounter between two Americans in Tokyo; and Michael Polish's Northfork, scripted by his twin brother, Mark, a richly textured, visionary film about an old frontier town evacuated to make way for a hydroelectric dam. In The Singing Detective, directed by Keith Gordon, Robert Downey, Jr., was outstanding as Stephen Potter's tormented, hallucinating hero.
Among the films designed for a younger audience were P.J. Hogan's live-action Peter Pan and Bo Welch's Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. As computer techniques made the production process much faster and less dependent on individual artists, animation films proliferated. (See Sidebar.) The Disney Studios made The Jungle Book 2, Piglet's Big Movie, and Brother Bear. Disney's Pixar Studios subsidiary enjoyed success with the computer-made animation feature Finding Nemo, and DreamWorks produced Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.
Academy Awards were granted to (among others) director-writer Michael Moore, director Roman Polanski, and actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. For a listing of the winners of major awards, see the table International Film Awards 2003. Among the notable individuals who died in 2003 were Stan Brakhage, Jeanne Crain, Katharine Hepburn, Dame Wendy Hiller, Bob Hope, Donald O'Connor, Gregory Peck, Leni Riefenstahl, and John Schlesinger.
The most spectacular production of 2003 by an English director was Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain. Based on the best-selling 1997 novel by Charles Frazier, it related the odyssey of a wounded Confederate soldier making his way home to Cold Mountain, N.C., and the woman he loves. A more modest spectacle was Kevin Macdonald's documentary Touching the Void, an intelligent and superbly photographed reconstruction of a real-life mountain-climbing incident.
The English taste in regional comedy flourished with Nigel Cole's box-office success Calendar Girls, featuring a group of senior British actresses (Julie Waters, Helen Mirren) in the real-life account of a women's group that produces a fund-raising calendar featuring them nude. Historical subjects included Mike Barker's study of Oliver Cromwell and the English Commonwealth, To Kill A King; Peter Webber's study of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring; and Christine Jeffs's careful but uninvolving portrait of the poet Sylvia Plath in Sylvia.
The British predilection for literary adaptation was demonstrated in Tim Fywell's rendering of Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, Richard Loncraine's elegant adaptation of William Trevor's My House in Umbria, and Stephen Fry's directorial debut with Bright Young Things from Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. David Mackenzie's Young Adam, the story of the casual sexual depredations of a 1950s drifter, was adapted from the novel by Alexander Trocchi.
More personal projects were Richard Jobson's Sixteen Years of Alcohol (2002), an inventive and cinematic rendering of the director's semiautobiographical novel about a young man's battle with his own violent anger, and Sarah Gavron's This Little Life, based on Rosemary Kay's script about parenting a premature baby with little chance of survival. The veteran eccentric of British cinema Peter Greenaway produced two episodes of The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia extravaganza in which he took up themes present in his earlier avant-garde films.
Few films from Australia made a mark at international festivals in 2003. Alexandra's Project, by Rolf de Heer, tells the story of a sadistic punishment devised for an inconsiderate husband. Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly was the sixth screen embodiment of Australia's legendary 19th-century outlaw. From New Zealand the first film entirely shot in Maori was Don Selwyn's The Maori Merchant of Venice (2002), a free and imaginative rerendering of Shakespeare. Also noteworthy was Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002), in which a young girl battles ancient patriarchal tradition.
French-speaking Canada offered Les Invasions barbares, in which Denys Arcand continued his tragicomic investigation of family and society begun 17 years earlier with Le Déclin de l'empire américain. Many members of the original cast returned in their old roles for a story centred on the fatal illness of one of their number. The ever-inventive Robert Lepage adapted his one-man show into the visually inventive drama La Face cachée de la lune (The Far Side of the Moon).
France continued to maintain the highest production levels of any European country and produced more than twice the number of features made in the United Kingdom or Germany. Most were routine genre films, with a predominance of crime dramas and domestic comedies, but the activity and versatility of the most prominent directors remained impressive. The inventive François Ozon's Swimming Pool looked at the creative imagination through the confrontation of a disciplined English writer and an out-of-control teenager. The thriller master Claude Chabrol's La Fleur du mal (The Flower of Evil) depicted a bourgeois French family confronted by a 60-year-old mystery. Patrice Chéreau's Son frère (His Brother) feelingly recounted the reunion of a man and his terminally ill brother. Alain Corneau's Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) treated with a sharp observant wit the problems of a Belgian interpreter in a Japanese firm. Jean-Pierre Rappeneau's Bon voyage followed the fortunes of a group of well-connected but dubious characters evacuated to Bordeaux during the occupation of Paris in 1940. Jacques Rivette's L'Histoire de Marie et Julien was a characteristic, exquisitely crafted, quiet anecdote about a couple who meet again after a year apart.
Germany enjoyed a runaway international success with Wolfgang Becker's modest Good Bye, Lenin!, an endearing comedy-drama about a devoted son's efforts to hide the reunification of Germany from his ailing mother, a loyal Cold War communist. Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse soberly reconstructed a Holocaust incident and its legacy. In Austria Michael Haneke offered a characteristic apocalyptic vision of contemporary violence in Le Temps du loup (The Time of the Wolf).
Italy's output was mainly genre pictures, but it also continued a tradition of films dealing with contemporary social and political life. Veteran directors in vigorous form included Ermanno Olmi with his exquisite Chinese myth of a lady pirate, Cantando dietro i paraventi; Marco Bellocchio with Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), a re-creation of the kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists; and Pupi Avati with Il cuore altrove (The Heart Is Elsewhere), an attractive, whimsical story of a virginal classics teacher's encounter with a femme fatale.
From younger directors Gabriele Salvatores's Io non ho paura (I'm Not Scared) showed visual flair in adapting Niccolò Ammaniti's novel about a Sicilian child who stumbles on his parents' involvement in the abduction of a rich child. Ferzan Ozpetek's La finestra di fronte (The Window Opposite) ingeniously interwove the mystery of an amnesiac old man and the romantic adventure of a beaten-down working-class wife; Constanza Quatriglio's L'isola (The Island) skillfully combined fiction with documentary in portraying the life of a small fishing village.
From Spain, with the third largest production in Europe, Miguel Hermoso's La luz prodigiosa (The End of a Mystery) was an intriguing speculation about the possibility that poet Federico García Lorca survived execution during the Spanish Civil War to become an amnesiac vagrant. David Trueba's Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamina) also offered a new approach to the recurrent Civil War genre—a young journalist's search for living witnesses. Eloy de la Iglesia's Los novios búlgaros (Bulgarian Lovers) was a comedy-drama, with social overtones, about a Spaniard's amorous obsession with a Bulgarian immigrant.
The doyen of Scandinavian cinema, Ingmar Bergman, at age 85 declared that Saraband (made for television and initially denied theatrical exhibition by its director) was the last film of his long career. This minor but worthy swan song, revisiting the 1973 Scenes from a Marriage, chronicled the reunion of wife (Liv Ullmann) and venomously embittered husband (Erland Josephson). Otherwise, films from the Nordic countries were largely crime stories, such as Colin Nutley's Paradiset, and light character and genre pieces, such as Icelander Dagur Kári's Nói albinói (Noi the Albino). The most notable exception was Lars von Trier's multinational co-production Dogville. Ingeniously minimalist, the film was a parable of small-town intolerance. Some American critics, offended that it was set in the U.S., deemed it anti-American.
Notable contributions from countries with smaller film industries included the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak (2002; Distant), an exquisite minimalist study of an everyday relationship between an urban man and his unemployed country cousin; and, from The Netherlands, Ben Sombogaart's De Tweeling (2002; The Twin Sisters), the historical story of twin sisters, separated in childhood, who grow up in Nazi Germany and Occupied Holland under very different circumstances.
Three of the most interesting films from Russia were variations on the theme of fathers and sons. In Andrey Zvyagintsev's Vozvrashcheniye (The Return), which won the Golden Lion award at the Venice festival, an absent father's return to take his two sons on a trip has a startling outcome. Aleksandr Sokurov's Otets i syn (Father and Son) explored the mysterious and disturbingly homoerotic depths of a filial relationship. Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksey Popogrebsky's gifted debut film, Koktebel, related the odyssey of a widowed father and his 11-year-old son en route to the Crimean city of that name.
The most significant new Hungarian films—notably Benedek Fliegauf's shoestring video piece Rengeteg (Forest), Péter Gothár's Magyar szépzég (Hungarian Beauty), and József Pacskovszky's A Boldogság színe (The Colour of Happiness)—struggled to analyze the contemporary consumerist society and the place of individuals within it. The veteran Károly Makk's Egy hét Pesten és Budán (A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda) was an echo of his 1971 classic Szerelem (Love); it concerned an old couple reunited after having been separated by the Revolution of 1956.
The best films from the Czech Republic contemplated remembered history. Jan Hrebejk's Pupendo was a wry look at life in the socialist 1980s and the punishments that the authorities reserved for artists perceived as dissidents. Complementing this, Martin Sulík's Klíc k urcování trpaslíku aneb poslední cesta Lemuela Gullivera (2002; The Key for Determining Dwarfs or the Last Travel of Lemuel Gulliver) dramatized the diaries of the gifted filmmaker Pavel Juracek (1935–89).
The countries of former Yugoslavia dealt fiercely and fearlessly with recent history and present disorders. From Serbia and Montenegro, Dušan Kovačević's Profesionalac (The Professional) confronted a former dissident with the policeman who in former years had been his nemesis. From Croatia, Vinko Brešan's well-crafted Svjedoci (Witnesses) re-created a small segment of the cycle of war crimes through the eyes of a variety of witnesses.
In Romania, Lucian Pintilie's Niki et Flo portrayed the breakdown under the pressures of contemporary living of an old army veteran. Nicolae Margineanu's Binecuvântata fii, închisoare (2002; Bless You, Prison) recorded the prison experiences of intellectual Nicole Valéry in the early socialist era.
Despite all cultural obstacles, Iran remained a world centre of creative filmmaking. Foremost among productions in 2003 were Jafar Panahi's Talaye sorgh (Crimson Gold), scripted by Iran's inspirational master Abbas Kiarostami, the story of a pizza delivery man who finally and fatally rebels against the humiliations heaped upon the have-nots of modern society; and 23-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf's Panj é asr (At Five in the Afternoon), which related the battle for emancipation of a young Afghan woman, fired with the ambition to become the country's president. A documentary on the making of this film was directed by the director's 15-year-old sister Hana. Modern Iranian youths striving to direct their own destiny was the theme of Parviz Shahbazi's Nafas-e amigh (Deep Breath), about sophisticated middle-class dropouts; and Mamad Haghighat's Deux fereshté (Two Angels) was about a boy's persisting in his desire to become a music student despite parental opposition. Abolfazl Jalili's autobiographical Abjad (The First Letter)—the story of a sincerely religious young man who is punished for his humanist interpretation of the Qurʾan and love of a Jewish young woman—was condemned by the authorities.
Production was revived in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. Siddiq Barmak's Osama, the first feature film from Afghanistan since the routing of the Taliban, looked at the oppression of women under that misogynist regime through the story of a young girl who secures a job by disguising herself as a boy. The first Iraqi film to be made internationally available in 15 years, Amer Alwan's made-for-television Zaman, l'homme des roseaux (Zaman, the Man from the Reeds) illuminated Iraq's civilization through the protagonist's journey from an ancient rural world to the terrible modernity of Baghdad, in quest of medicine for his sick wife.
An Israeli film, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's Massaʾot James beʾeretz hakodesh (James' Journey to Jerusalem) offered a healthily ironic picture of contemporary Israeli society through the travels of a religious young African making a private pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The cinema of China continued to surprise with its interest in private destinies in a fast-changing world. Good examples were Jiang Cheng Ding's Chaplinesque comedy Xiao ti qing (Violin), about a humble newspaper vendor who discovers his desire to make music; and Guan Hu's Xi shi yan (2002; Eyes of a Beauty), which intertwined the predicaments of three women. Alongside this a lively subversive cinema brought works such as Hu Ze's Beijing Suburb (2002), about an unofficial and repressed artists' colony; and Andrew Cheng's revelation of a defiant sexual subculture in Mu di di Shanghai (2002; Welcome to Destination Shanghai). In contrast, China's major international film artist Zhang Yimou made his first foray into martial arts films with the epic-scaled Ying xiong (Hero), mythical in approach but based on the true story of an effort to murder Shihuangdi, the first emperor of unified China, in the 3rd century bc.
The other film industries in the region flourished with an output of formula films—crime, thriller, teen romance, and horror—of varying merit. The rare maverick films of 2003 included, from South Korea, a spectacular adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses set in 18th-century Korea, Seukaendeul: Joseon namnyeo sangyeoljisa (Untold Scandal), by E. J-yong (Yi Jae Yong); and most notably Kim Ki Duk's Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring), a film of exceptional if sometimes enigmatic aesthetic pleasures: the life—through a cycle of innocence, fall, regeneration, and rebirth—of a young monk at a strange deserted island monastery.
Japanese cinema, outside predictable mainstream production, in 2003 suffered one of the thinnest years in its history. Cult actor-director Takeshi Kitano (see Biographies) attracted little attention with his film Zatōichi, in which he resurrected the long-popular screen myth of the eponymous blind yakuza.
Mumbai (Bombay) producers extended the conventions of Indian commercial cinema to embrace new elements of thriller, science fiction (Rakesh Roshan's Koi … mil gaya [I Found Someone]), and gangster movies (Ram Gopal Varma's Company, 2002). Outside this mainstream Rituparno Ghosh adapted Rabindranath Tagore's 1902 novel of feminism and colonial resistance, Chokher bali. Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Nizhalkkuthu (2002; Shadow Kill) explored the private agonies of a hangman. Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool transposed Shakespeare's Macbeth to the criminal areas of modern Mumbai. Mahesh Dattani's Mango Soufflé (2002), adapted from the director's own play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, was a social breakthrough for India, a sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality in a well-heeled professional society.
Few films from the cumulatively prolific Latin American production made an international impact in 2003, though works to note were Argentine Albertina Carri's Los rubios (The Blonds), a complex, experimental combination of fiction, documentary, and avant-garde filmmaking that explored the disappearance and murder of the writer-director's parents under the military dictatorship; and, from Cuba, Fernando Pérez's Suite Habana, a practically wordless mosaic of contemporary Havana characters whose dreams, mostly dashed, provide a subtly subversive critique of Fidel Castro's Cuba.
While many films, such as Burkina Faso director Idrissa Ouedraogo's La Colére des dieux (Anger of the Gods), drew on tribal and traditional life, filmmakers in all parts of Africa were consciously using films in the cause of social betterment. One of the most fiercely critical was Le Silence de la forêt, a co-production of Cameroon, Gabon, and Central African Republic directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kohbio, about the frustrations of a French-educated idealist who returns to discover the corruption and incorrigibility of society in his (unspecified) native country. From South Africa, David Hickson's Beat the Drum was a morality drama on the prevention of AIDS, presented through the journey of a small village boy who becomes briefly an urban street kid. The Tunisian Nouri Bouzid's Arais al tein (2002; Clay Dolls) looked at the abuse of women and children by those who live by supplying young girls from the poor countryside as maids to rich employers in the city.
Steven Silver's film The Last Just Man (2001) received much favourable attention in 2003. It featured Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who headed the UN troops stationed in Rwanda during the genocidal civil war of 1994. In 2002 the film had won Best of Fest at the Columbus (Ohio) Film Festival and Gold trophies at the Chicago International Television Competition and U.S. International Film and Video Festival, Los Angeles, and in 2003 it continued to garner awards internationally. A French film made in 2001 won widespread acclaim when it was released in 2003 as Winged Migration. Regine Cardin's Action! exuded French humour while selling Paris as a good place to do business. Made for the Paris Industrial Chamber of Commerce, the film was Best of Festival at WorldMediaFestival in Hamburg, Ger., and won the Grand Prix at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival. The merging of tradition and the future, symbolized in the use of Clariant pigments for the creation of a Japanese kite, was the subject of Hagenfilm's Innovations for Clariant GmbH. It won top awards at WorldFest in Houston, Texas; INTERCOM, Chicago; and U.S. International Film and Video Festival. Judy's Time (2000) recounted the life of 57-year-old Judy Flannery, a mother of five, who was also a world champion triathlete in her prime when she was struck and killed by a car. The filmmaker, her daughter Erin, who made the film as a graduate student, received several awards, including CINE's Eagle Award (2000) and Master Series Award (2001) and the International Documentary Association award for Distinguished Short Documentary (2002).
Nontheatrical Films
Steven Silver's film The Last Just Man (2001) received much favourable attention in 2003. It featured Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who headed the UN troops stationed in Rwanda during the genocidal civil war of 1994. In 2002 the film had won Best of Fest at the Columbus (Ohio) Film Festival and Gold trophies at the Chicago International Television Competition and U.S. International Film and Video Festival, Los Angeles, and in 2003 it continued to garner awards internationally.
A French film made in 2001 won widespread acclaim when it was released in 2003 as Winged Migration. Regine Cardin's Action! exuded French humour while selling Paris as a good place to do business. Made for the Paris Industrial Chamber of Commerce, the film was Best of Festival at WorldMediaFestival in Hamburg, Ger., and won the Grand Prix at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival.
The merging of tradition and the future, symbolized in the use of Clariant pigments for the creation of a Japanese kite, was the subject of Hagenfilm's Innovations for Clariant GmbH. It won top awards at WorldFest in Houston, Texas; INTERCOM, Chicago; and U.S. International Film and Video Festival.
Judy's Time (2000) recounted the life of 57-year-old Judy Flannery, a mother of five, who was also a world champion triathlete in her prime when she was struck and killed by a car. The filmmaker, her daughter Erin, who made the film as a graduate student, received several awards, including CINE's Eagle Award (2000) and Master Series Award (2001) and the International Documentary Association award for Distinguished Short Documentary (2002).


text:
This gunfight happened in Trenton, N.J., on Memorial Day weekend. A man wearing a hoodie approached two other men standing outside a deli and opened fire. The two men drew their own weapons and started shooting back. But remember, if you're approached in a deserted area by a man wearing a hoodie, you shouldn't be afraid. Just offer him some Skittles. Yeah, that'll do it.
Read more: NJ.com
Jack Furnari
Latest posts by Jack Furnari (see all)
- Cop-killing Twitter account finally gets shut down! - January 6, 2015
- The official trailer tease for 'Entourage' is rocking the internet - December 23, 2014
- Video: New York City Police officers turn their backs on DeBlasio in disgust - December 20, 2014

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Sun may set on Coliseum
TRT's vision includes restaurants, small shops
The City Council on Tuesday spurned apartments and high-end retail for fairgrounds, entertainment and small-scale shopping as the new use for the Memorial Coliseum site - a decision that might mean the end of the bayfront icon.
After seven months of gathering qualifications and proposals, city staff revealed three developers' plans for Memorial Coliseum, and the council voted to begin negotiating on a lease that would allow TRT Development Co. to build fairgrounds on the site and perhaps demolish Memorial Coliseum.
TRT Development is connected to TRT Holdings Inc., owned by investor and Corpus Christi native Robert Rowling, who also owns almost one-quarter of the land in the Downtown Management District, including the Omni hotels and the Ritz Theater.
TRT's proposal is called Boardwalk by the Bay, and is entirely developer-funded. Michael G. Smith, vice president of TRT, said he envisioned an amphitheater, a miniature golf course, go-carts, restaurants, some small shops and rides for kids - possibly including a Ferris wheel. Several council members said they would rather there be no Ferris wheel, as that might bring to mind old arguments surrounding a failed proposal by Landry's Restaurant Inc., which also included a Ferris wheel.
"If there is a way to remove the Ferris wheel, that sure would make everybody else's life a lot easier," Councilman Mark Scott said.
Councilwoman Melody Cooper voted against TRT's proposal for that very reason.
"Is this deja vu?" she asked the staff when they recommended TRT's proposal. "It's Landry's all over again. I will never vote for TRT as it stands, because it's exactly what the public was so outraged about. I can't fathom why y'all (recommended it)."
Assistant City Manager Oscar Martinez said the fairgrounds proposal was recommended over The NRP Group's Vista de la Bahia - a 231-unit residential complex with a park area under the Memorial Coliseum frame - and Wisznia Associates' Paseo Del Mar - a high-end retail complex that included apartments and used the coliseum as a grocery store and nightclub - for several reasons. LandLord Resources, which had also been invited to submit a plan, instead proposed that the city hire the firm as a master developer to look into problems that developing the Coliseum site might present and to work with the city on the best way to do so.
The group evaluating the proposals - made up of city staff, the Bayfront Master Plan design team and PKF Consulting - gave TRT a score of 92.7, compared to NRP's 82.4 and Wisznia's 84.1. Vista de la Bahia, Martinez said, could have been built anywhere, and there was no synergy between the residential complex and the use of the Coliseum. And Wisznia Associates offered no proof, he said, that high-end retailers would be interested in coming to Paseo Del Mar.
But the most important point for the council seemed to be financing. TRT was able to pay for the estimated $30 million project on its own and did not ask the city for any tax abatement, as the NRP Group did, or a Tax Increment Financing Zone, as Wisznia Asociates did.
"The others are great proposals, but there's no funding for the Wisznia plan," Councilman Brent Chesney said. "This guy just came into town and offered $30 million of his own money."
TRT would divide the profits with the city, 50-50, after it recouped its development costs in seven years. The proposal estimated 490,000 people would visit Boardwalk by the Bay each year, and that it would take 25 to 32 months to build.
TRT's proposal called for tearing down Memorial Coliseum - instead, the firm would restore the memorial's plaque and donate $25,000 toward a new memorial, which might be built in one of the adjacent parks. Several council members seemed unconvinced that this was the best way to go. Councilman John Marez said he talked with veterans who were worried that the city would get rid of their memorial just this week. He hoped the city staff would look into the feasibility of keeping the coliseum as they entered negotiations, and said he wouldn't have voted for TRT's plan if that hadn't been a possibility.
"I want to hear more about what alternatives we could have on memorializing the veterans," he said. "The structure's not in the proposal, but you never know until you ask. I think we should make all efforts before we decide to take it down."
Smith said he wasn't sure leaving the building up was a good idea - he would rather put money into creating a new memorial than preserve the building.
"I don't think it's workable to leave the Coliseum up and do anything like what we're proposing to do," he said. "(Instead) we would take the plaque off the building and put it on some more permanent memorial."
Martinez said he would hope to have a contract ready for the council to approve in about 90 days. If the contract includes tearing down the Coliseum, he said demolition might begin 90 days after that.
Sept. 26, 1954
Memorial Coliseum, designed by highly regarded local architect Richard Colley, is dedicated to the 400 soldiers from Nueces County who died in World War II. Original cost is $957,931.75 for 71,779 square feet.
April 17, 1956
An Elvis Presley show with 6,000 in attendance sets off rock 'n' roll event restrictions at the coliseum for a while. Through the years, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Willie Nelson all play at the coliseum.
Exposition Hall, a one-story building adjacent to Memorial Coliseum is razed.
Oct. 3, 1998
After spending more than $1 million, the IceRays open the only skating rink in Texas south of San Antonio in the converted coliseum.
Oct. 13, 1998
The first Western Professional Hockey League game of the season in Corpus Christi begins with Hollywood star Lou Diamond Phillips dropping the puck. The sold-out crowd at the Coliseum watches the IceRays fall to Ice Bats, 4-3.
May 2001
Leon Loeb proposes building the South Wharf project -- a four-acre addition to the seawall across the street from Memorial Coliseum that would include restaurants, retail space, a small marina and condominiums.
Oct. 2, 2003
A consultant hired by the city recommends getting rid of the coliseum if the city can't find another way to use it after the opening of the larger American Bank Center. Renovation costs are estimated as much as $4.4 million and demolition at about $500,000. Mayor Loyd Neal asks City Manager Skip Noe to bring back to the council more definite numbers on demolition costs and the land's value.
March 2004
The building is added to Preservation Texas Most Endangered Places.
April 2004
Bayfront master plan developed by a team led by local architect Raymond Gignac calls for Memorial Coliseum to be reused in some fashion, possibly building a pier that extends from the building's front door to the existing marina breakwater and creating larger parks nearby.
July 9, 2004
Rayz announce official move to new AmericanBank Center from Memorial Coliseum, the Central Hockey League's oldest and smallest building, with signing of five-year lease.
July 26, 2004
City officials and the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corp. are negotiating with several companies, including the Springfield, Mo.-based Bass Pro Shops, for the redevelopment of Memorial Coliseum.
Jan. 31, 2005
The City Council votes to enter into negotiations with TRT Development Co. for a lease that would allow the company to build a fairgrounds on the site and possibly raze the coliseum.
Mar. 11, 2005
Bass Pro Shops decides against renovating the building.
June 20, 2005
Mayor Henry Garrett asks the City Council to make a decision on its fate by Dec. 31. City staff sets a schedule to accept proposals for the building.
Dec. 21, 2005
Four developers complete proposals for Memorial Coliseum. They are: Corpus Christi companies LandLord Resources and Wisznia Associates; Irving-based TRT Development Co., which owns several downtown properties including the Omni Hotels; and the NRP Group in San Antonio, which specializes in housing complexes.
Contact Brandi Dean at 886-3778 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Subscribe to the Caller-Times
Need Help? Call us at 1-800-566-8098.
Monday-Friday: 5am-8pm / Saturday: 7am-12pm / Sunday: 6am-1pm