WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Chicago's fall arts season is already plenty busy. But this fall the city will host another major event: a week long festival of art and culture. 

This is the perfect time to be a young actor. Sure, the global economy sucks, but when has it ever been a good time for a career in the arts? 

The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) has begun to fulfill Rahm Emmanuel’s campaign promise to draft a comprehensive cultural plan for the City of Chicago. We haven’t had a new one since 1986 when Mayor Harold Washington first established the Dept.

Some theater folk hold that 90% of the work of a really good director is casting the show. Certainly, there are times when the quality of the talent on stage is such that a gifted director simply gets out of the way and makes him/herself invisible. But not always.

Well, after 10 months of dickering the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) finally has a budget for Fiscal 2012, which began quite some time ago.

Early last April, when Rahm Emanuel merely was Mayor-Elect, I used this blog space to send him an open letter about the CityArts Program. I never heard back from him.

There could be worse ways to handle succession planning than the one chosen by the Miami City Ballet, but it would be hard to think of one.