ATLANTA (AP) — Madea is coming to the state Capitol. Tyler Perry is scheduled to be honored by the Senate on Wednesday for his achievements as an entertainer and humanitarian. The 40-year-old New Orleans native and Atlanta resident is the first celebrity to be honored in the chamber this session. Five state senators are presenting a resolution to Perry. The resolution cites his sharp-tongued “Madea” character, his creation of Tyler Perry Studios as the first independent movie studio of its size in the state and his donations to area food banks and various charities.
March 17, 2010 | Posted in
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LONDON (AP) — They are icons of Britain: a Victorian-era statesman, a World War I soldier-poet, fish and chips. They’re also Jewish – evidence of the 1,000-year history of Jews in Britain, whose story is told in a museum reopening this week after a 10 million pound ($15 million) expansion. “Fish and chips, which everyone thinks of as very English, is in fact Sephardic Jewish,” said celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who helped relaunch the London Jewish Museum on Tuesday after a two-year closure. Many believe that Britain’s national dish has its origins in fried fish introduced to the country by Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Food and the nature of Britishness both play a significant part in the museum, which has expanded from a Victorian house in London’s Camden Town to a former piano factory next door, tripling its floorspace. Among the interactive displays is a chance to smell chicken soup cooking in a recreated East End immigrant’s kitchen. There also is a cavalcade of historical figures, both famous and obscure, including 19th-century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli; war poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed on the Western Front; and Daniel Mendoza, an 18th-century boxing champion of England. Their stories sit alongside those of humbler figures – laborers, seamstresses, trade unionists, entertainers. “We’re telling the story of the Jewish community in London, but we’re also telling the story of London,” said Sarah Jillings, the museum’s exhibition project director. Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community stretches back to 1066, when the first Jews arrived with William the Conqueror’s invading Norman army. The museum attests to a thriving medieval community. One of its star displays is a 13th-century mikvah, or ritual bath, uncovered in what is now the heart of London’s financial district. England’s entire Jewish population was expelled by King Edward I in 1290 after years of anti-Semitic violence, and Jews were only readmitted in 1656 under Oliver Cromwell, who had overthrown the monarchy. From there, the museum tells an evocative tale – common to many immigrant communities – of dislocation and hard work, prejudice and resistance, and the gradual move from inner-city tenements to greater prosperity in the suburbs. “There are many Jewish museums, Holocaust museums – extraordinary places – around the world,” said Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC and a patron of the museum. “But this is one that tells the story of an immigrant culture, and therefore chimes with many people around the world today.” One gallery is devoted to the Holocaust, focusing on the experience of one British survivor of Auschwitz, while another holds a large display of Jewish ceremonial art. The venue calls itself the only museum in London dedicated to a minority group. Its curators acknowledge that the history of Britain’s Jews is also the history of anti-Semitism. For centuries Jews were barred from many professions, including serving in Parliament – Disraeli was allowed because he had converted to Christianity as a teenager. A century ago, the press ran sensationalist headlines about “alien” newcomers as tens of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe settled in Britain. In recent years Jewish community leaders have reported a rise in anti-Semitic incidents, attributed in part to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the dwindling number of people with memories of the Holocaust. The museum sees its role as helping to build social cohesion. It predicts that a majority of the 65,000 visitors expected this year will not be Jewish, and will include many groups of schoolchildren. Lawson said the history of the Jewish community is “deeply interwoven with the fabric of this country” – and is primarily a positive story. “The history of the Jews is very much told in terms of persecution,” she said. “It’s interesting to question that.” — On the Net: http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk
March 16, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge has approved a legal settlement for the wife and young son of former Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker’s bodyguard, who was killed in a plane crash. The settlement with Learjet Inc., Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and other companies involved in the ownership and making of the jet will pay for college for Chris Baker’s 3-year-old son and give him more than $17 million over his lifetime. It also will pay Baker’s widow more than $7.6 million. Otilia Baker and her son attended a brief hearing Tuesday before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel. Baker was killed in a plane crash in Columbia, S.C., in September 2008. The crash killed four people and left Barker and celebrity disc jockey DJ AM seriously injured. DJ AM later died of a drug overdose. The cause of the crash has yet to be determined.
March 16, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — The ladies in red brought down the house. Six Broadway divas, spanning several generations of musical theater, pretty much tore up Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on Monday night as the New York Philharmonic and a bevy of Broadway stars celebrated the upcoming 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim, composer of “Sweeney Todd, “Company” and “A Little Night Music,” among other shows. Sondheim’s birthday isn’t until March 22, but no matter. Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, Marin Mazzie, Audra McDonald and Elaine Stritch started the festivities early. Each was dressed in bright red during a special second-act segment that had all six on stage at the same time.
March 16, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — A musical celebrating Ray Charles is headed for Broadway this fall. “Unchain My Heart” will open Nov. 7 with preview performances beginning Oct. 8. Producer Stuart Benjamin said Thursday the show would feature a book by Suzan-Lori Parks and direction by Sheldon Epps. Casting will be announced. Benjamin worked with the late singer for 15 years and produced “Ray,” the hit movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx. Parks won a Pulitzer Prize for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” An earlier version of the musical called “Ray Charles Live” was produced at California’s Pasadena Playhouse in 2007.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — A musical celebrating Ray Charles is headed for Broadway this fall. “Unchain My Heart” will open Nov. 7 with preview performances beginning Oct. 8. Producer Stuart Benjamin said Thursday the show would feature a book by Suzan-Lori Parks and direction by Sheldon Epps. Casting will be announced. Benjamin worked with the late singer for 15 years and produced “Ray,” the hit movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx. Parks won a Pulitzer Prize for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” An earlier version of the musical called “Ray Charles Live” was produced at California’s Pasadena Playhouse in 2007.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is grateful that actor Sean Penn has defended him against his critics within the U.S. media. In an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” last week, Penn slammed Chavez critics who refer to the socialist leader as a dictator. The Oscar-winning celebrity noted that Chavez has won repeated elections and suggested that media critics who call him a dictator should be jailed. He says that “there should be a bar for which one goes to prison for these kinds of biases.” Penn has visited Chavez several times and frequently defends the president’s leftist political policies. Chavez welcomed Penn’s comments Wednesday and thanked the actor for standing up to his detractors.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A spark that helped ignite Elvis Presley’s fame more than 50 years ago was lit by the newspaper editors and critics who hated him. They detested his voice and thought his moves were unfit for family publications, all while teenagers went wild. It’s that shocking style and clash with the media that also will make Elvis the subject of a new exhibition at the Newseum, a history museum that celebrates the First Amendment in Washington. “Newspapers in the mid-’50s viewed themselves as arbiters of social values, and they felt they should be among the ones to speak most loudly when they saw someone threatening America’s mores,” said Ken Paulson, the Newseum’s president and former editor of USA Today. “What’s interesting is that fiercely negative coverage drove Elvis’ fame. … After the national news coverage kicked in, he was the king of rock ‘n’ roll.” Elvis’ two years of service in the U.S. Army, though, was a turning point. Parents couldn’t hate him anymore, and the news media eventually came along, too. The exhibit opening March 19 traces Elvis’ rise in the 1950s – in part a study in image management by his longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker – to his meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970. It will include rare objects from Presley’s life, some never before displayed outside of Graceland and others never before publicly displayed anywhere. Objects in the collection include Elvis’ 1957 Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was key to his rebel image, his first Grammy Award for “How Great Thou Art” in 1968, the overcoat and gold belt Elvis wore to meet Nixon at the White House, and the Bureau of Narcotics badge the president gave Presley. He had requested to be made a “federal agent-at-large” to help fight drug use. Many documents will be displayed for the first time, including the 1955 exclusive management contract Elvis and his parents signed, giving Parker 25 percent of his income. (Later, in the 1970s, Parker’s stake rose to an unprecedented 50 percent.) “If you’re a die-hard Elvis fan, you either love Colonel or you hate Colonel,” said Angie Marchese, Graceland’s director of archives who helped develop the exhibit. “It’s like everything that Colonel did for Elvis in the 50s, would Elvis have been as big of a pop culture phenomenon without Colonel? Probably not. “But every relationship like that draws scrutiny.” The Newseum show on view through February 2011 is among a series of exhibits this year marking what would have been Elvis’ 75th birthday. In January, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery opened an exhibit of Elvis artwork. In Los Angeles, the Grammy Museum has a Smithsonian traveling exhibit of Elvis photographs by Alfred Wertheimer. Paulson, who said he has been an Elvis fan since he was a young boy, said a partnership with Graceland was a natural fit for a look at entertainment history through the eyes of the media. “There were many people who were more than willing to censor him or limit his expression,” he said. “So Elvis truly is a symbol of freedom in America for all the right reasons.” Marchese said the images and objects give people a chance to reflect on what Elvis might be doing if he were alive. “You’d want to think he would still be involved in music somehow, not necessarily going to Vegas and performing in jumpsuits like he was in the ’70s … his career probably would have progressed from that,” she said. “I’m thinking he probably would have had a career rebirth in Hollywood as well.” — On the Net: Newseum: http://www.newseum.org/
March 11, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — A 12-hour adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel will be among the highlights of Lincoln Center Festival 2010, running for 45 performances this summer. Festival director Nigel Redden said Wednesday the arts celebration, which runs from July 7 to July 25, will take place at Lincoln Center and at various other locations around New York. The festival includes two events on Governors Island, located off lower Manhattan. The Governors Island productions will include Peter Stein’s 12-hour version of Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons,” performed July 10 and July 11 in Italian with English subtitles. The novel, also known as “The Possessed,” concerns a group of young revolutionaries. Among the other groups scheduled to take part in the festival are the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (July 15-17) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, which will present an adaptation by Ivo van Hove of “Teorema,” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film and novel of middle-class disintegration. It runs July 15-19. The festival will open with the American premiere of Hisashi Inoue’s Noh-inspired play “Musashi” (July 7-10). It will also include “A Disappearing Number,” created by Complicite, the British theater company under the direction of Simon McBurney. “Number” (July 15-18) examines the friendship between two famous mathematicians, G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, in the early years of the 20th century, juxtaposed with a contemporary love story. The New York Philharmonic will be featured in the festival, too, helping to perform the complete works of innovative composer Edgard Varese (July 19-20). And dance also will be represented by Thailand’s Pichet Klunchun Dance Company (July 24-25).
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Long-ago lapped by Facebook in popularity and with fast-growing Twitter on its tail, social networking site MySpace is planning a series of updates over the next months that will link its users’ posts to those sites more easily and carve out its niche as an entertainment hub more clearly. Those changes, among others, were unveiled by co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn, 38, and Mike Jones, 34, this week following the abrupt departure of CEO Owen Van Natta in February after just 10 months on the job. The two remaining executives, who once shared a single office with Van Natta and now remain in it together, declined to comment much on Van Natta’s departure, other than to say his decision to leave was between him and parent News Corp.’s chief digital officer Jonathan Miller. They also shed no new light on the ongoing ad-sharing deal with Google Inc., which forms the backbone of MySpace’s revenue but expires in August. “Owen’s decision and Jon’s decision were their own. Jon came to us and said, `Would you like to be co-presidents?’ We said, `Hell yeah.’ We didn’t have to move our desks,” Hirschhorn said in an interview at the Beverly Hills headquarters. “We were very much operating the company from a day-to-day basis and believed in the strategy that we laid out with Owen, frankly.” Attempts to reach Van Natta were unsuccessful. The executives acknowledged that change has been slow coming to the site, and critics have often cited its clunkiness compared to Facebook. MySpace’s monthly visitors declined 7 percent in January from a year ago to 120 million worldwide, compared to Facebook’s 471 million visitors, a 100 percent increase, according to Internet tracker comScore Inc. Twitter grew 1,100 percent to 74 million visitors over the same time. The goal of changes in the works now is about “making sure we return to the consumer zeitgeist,” Jones said, not about competing feature-for-feature with other social networks. Hirschhorn said that MySpace needs to be more uniquely focused on the 14 million musicians who put songs and videos on the site and how fans interact with them, and is giving more control to artists over their profiles, including with tracking tools. The site is also going open up its platform for games more widely, add a movie fan page, and reward users who act as evangelizers of content. “The experience that Mike and I and the teams aim to build is such that it’s a complement to your experience on Facebook,” he said. While Jones said the pair did not feel “specific pressure” from News Corp. to change how the site earns revenue, he described a time frame that was fairly short – through August and through the company’s fiscal year, which ends in June. “I think we have everything lined up strategically to where it needs to be,” Jones said. “It’s about us operationally executing on all of this, keeping pressure on the organization to get refocused on the committed strategy.” The two helped shut down some projects that spread resources too thinly and tread on needs well served by the likes of portal sites such as Yahoo or AOL. Such segments focused on cars, parenting, weather, horoscopes, classified ads and jobs. Now the site is refocusing its gaze on the core 13-34 age group that represents more than half of its visitors and 84 percent of all the time spent on the site. Some changes include a better, smarter “stream” that allows users to see more of what their friends are doing in a central location, resembling Facebook’s “News Feed” more closely. Previously, videos added by users would not appear on friend’s streams, for example. The site is also rolling out a “Super Post” update bar that allows users to post links, videos and updates to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter all at once. And in a change that symbolizes it is really putting its past behind it, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson, a smiling guy looking back across his white T-shirt, recently stopped being every new user’s first friend. Since last month, he’s been replaced by the cleverly named profile, Today On MySpace (T.O.M.), which features new songs, movie clips and celebrity updates and starts feeding into the new users’ stream right away. That leaves new users with a better sense of what MySpace has to offer, rather than leaving them with one friend and clueless, Jones said. “We were just like, `We’re not going to tell you what to do here, we’re not going to guide you. You’re welcome to here, and go figure something out,’” Jones said. “Now we’re saying, `OK we’re going to give you some guidance.’”
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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