Editorials
529 results
Page 43
The Orchestra's vanishing audience
A financial crisis, or a marketing crisis?
The Philadelphia Orchestra has lost 40% of its audience since Riccardo Muti departed. That statistic begs a fundamental question: What's the point of balancing your books if you can't sell your product?
Editorials
3 minute read
Doing good through dance: My father's story
He found his niche, through dance
Rebecca Davis and Ashley Fargnoli, two 20-something dance activists from Philadelphia, head for the world's hot spots armed with choreography. My dad did something similar nearly half a century ago, when he quit the rat race to start a dance company, for his benefit and the world's.
Editorials
4 minute read
Symbols and the Orchestra: Three examples from the "90s
What Police Chief Timoney understood (and the Philadelphia Orchestra doesn't)
Before you dismiss the value of symbols, consider their use at three institutions: the Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia School District and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Editorials
4 minute read
Gentiles and the new American Jewish History Museum
But is it good for the gentiles?
What is a museum of American Jewish history doing on Independence Mall, when there's no museum there for Brits, Irish, Germans or African-Americans? There's actually a good answer to that question.
Editorials
5 minute read
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The Orchestra's bankruptcy and the Pew connection
The Orchestra's failure and the elephant in the room
What's more dismaying— a Philadelphia Orchestra board that abdicates its responsibility to its creditors, or a major arts funder that shrinks from making artistic judgments?
Editorials
8 minute read
"Strangled' by government regulation
Ayn Rand lives!
The Philadelphia entrepreneur Joan Carter, recently inducted as the first woman president of the Union League, is a remarkable business success story. But she insists that she and her husband are “choking” on government regulation. Where have I heard this complaint before?
Editorials
5 minute read
The coal baron who wouldn't sell out
Requiem for a coal baron
Most coal barons sell out after a generation or so and retire to Fifth Avenue or Palm Beach, where they'll never have to think about coal again. Ted Leisenring, who died this month, refused to quit. Instead he spent half a century manning the front lines of a titanic human struggle to extract coal from the ground and deliver it to a relentlessly capricious and ungrateful market.
Editorials
7 minute read
The theatergoer who reviewed a "preview'
Crime and punishment
Marshall Ledger was a great editor for many years. But this month he pushed the envelope too far— forcing Philadelphia's no-nonsense theater community to take prompt and decisive action.
Editorials
4 minute read
Meyer Levin's Anne Frank obsession
Who owns Anne Frank?
Meyer Levin's long struggle to stage his own idiosyncratic vision of The Diary of Anne Frank is often portrayed as a fanatical obsession. But to my mind the aggrieved party is not merely Levin but anyone who's curious to sample his take on the Holocaust heroine.
Editorials
8 minute read
Optimists of the world, unite!
The West's debt to the Arabs
At the very least, the events of the past month in the Middle East remind us of a lesson we too often forget: that the past need not dictate the future.
Editorials
4 minute read