The Spoleto Festival USA plans to celebrate the reopening of a nearly 300-year old South Carolina theater with a production that was the first opera ever performed in the American colonies.
The organizers of the 34th annual arts festival plan several high profile evens for the restored facility, including a new production of the 18th century English ballad opera “Flora.
Christopher Plummers 2008 Stratford Shakespeare Festival performance as Julius Caesar in Bernard Shaws Caesar and Cleopatra will be broadcast in high definition Dec. 26 on Canadas CTV.
A DVD of the filmed performance is available through the Stratford Shakespeare Festivals Theatre Store, or by calling 567-1600.
Organizers for the Venice Film Festival have honored John Woo with its lifetime achievement award, saying the veteran director transformed action movies both in his native Hong Kong and his current professional home of Hollywood.
“The acknowledgment recognizes a filmmaker who in recent decades, with his revolutionary conception of staging and editing, has renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylization close to visual art, both in Asia and in Hollywood,” organizers said.
Roman Polanski’s latest movie, “The Ghost Writer,” will have its world premiere at the Berlin film festival in February, organizers said Tuesday.
The event is the first of the year’s major European film festivals and runs from Feb. 11-21.
Polanski’s movie was among a first batch of entries in the festival’s main program that was announced Tuesday - among them a premiere of Martin Scorsese’s thriller “Shutter Island.
Van the Man and The Queen of Soul are headlining next year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“It’s just a way cool thing that Jazz Fest is so broad that it can embrace all these different things, all these different artists,” the festival’s producer, Quint Davis, said Monday.
Joining Van Morrison and Aretha Franklin will be Pearl Jam, making its inaugural appearance at the fest, as well as Lionel Richie and actor Steve Martin, who plays banjo in his bluegrass outfit the Steep Canyon Rangers.
American pop singer-songwriter Pink will headline the 2010 Wireless festival in Londons Hyde Park on July 2.
Wireless will be staged for the sixth consecutive year in 2010. Previous headliners at the festival, which features four stages, include the White Stripes, Kanye West, Morrissey, Fatboy Slim and Daft Punk.
Ben Affleck, Katie Holmes, rapper 50 Cent and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” co-stars Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning are taking their acts to the Sundance Film Festival.
Stewart and Fanning team up for director Floria Sigismondi’s “The Runaways,” a portrait of rocker Joan Jett as she forms her band in the 1970s.
A China-based cyber attack on Saturday shut down online bookings for a leading Australian film festival, days before a controversial visit by a leading critic of Beijing, organizers said.
Festival spokeswoman Asha Holmes said a site in Chinese had been discovered carrying instructions on how to attack the festivals site.
China summoned the Australian ambassador to protest a proposed visit to his country by an exiled Uighur leader whom Beijing accuses of instigating recent ethnic riots that killed nearly 200 people, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
China one of Australia’s most important trading partners has made repeated requests to the Australian government to refuse her a visa.
Michael Moores documentary on the global financial crisis, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, will vie for the top prize at this years Venice film festival.
“It seemed that the writers strike, the financial difficulties had slammed the brakes on the most creative part of American cinema, but the selection has never been so great,” said festival director Marco Mueller as he unveiled the program of the Sept 2-12 event.