Issue #20: March 31, 1999

• Now that Titanic has closed its 804-performance run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, it is time to make way for the transfer of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast from the Palace Theater. This theatre shuffling will allow Disney to load-in its newest musical Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida. The Broadway opening will follow a run in Chicago beginning Nov. 5.

• Speaking of Beauty and the Beast everyone’s favorite Annie, Andrea McArdle, is now playing the Belle of the Broadway production.

• New Haven’s fourth annual International Festival of Arts & Ideas will premiere two new Royal Shakespeare Co. productions. The festival has extended from previous years of five days to 16 days beginning June 18. Keeping with the growing trend in anything Shakespeare this year, the RSC will present Troilus and Cressida. The other RSC premiere will be Brian Friel’s version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.

• Stratford, Ontario is the place to be this season (June 1 to Nov. 7) if the Bard is your cup of tea. The Stratford Festival will be presenting The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II and Macbeth. But if you’ve had enough Shakespeare for one year you can catch productions of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice and Richard Binsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal.

• Another great festival in Ontario is the Shaw Festival (May 25 to Nov. 28) located at Niagara On The Lake. This year’s offering includes Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Getting Married and Village Wooing, Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

• Saturday Night Fever, which opened at the London Palladium on May 5, 1998, is based on the movie that made a star out of John Travolta in 1977, is continuing to play to sold-out houses. You can now book tickets through to October.

• Art, currently at Wyndham’s Theatre, celebrated its 1000th performance on March 9. The international award-winning comedy will continue through to January 2000. But don’t be surprised if it goes beyond that date.

• Speaking of Art, the Yasmina Reza comedy is still playing to packed houses at the Theatre Royal in Sydney and is scheduled to play through May 2.

• Britain’s Sir Peter Hall has the right idea. He recently formed the Shadow Arts Council to keep tabs on the government run Arts Council. Since the Arts Council is charged with the responsibility to hand out subsidies to arts groups it is Hall’s belief that the council is not arts based but government based. His Shadow Arts Council will monitor the activities of the government based Arts Council, whose members lack any real knowledge of the arts. Sir Peter has an impressive Shadow Arts Council membership, which includes Dame Judi Dench, playwright Harold Pinter and composer Harrison Birtwistle. The forming of this council may be a thought for the North American arts community since over the years government support of the arts financially has deteriorated to an all time low. Just food for thought!