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In advance
Nutcracker tickets on sale, Independent Film Festival of Boston calls for 2004 entries, plus more

Boston Film Festival 2003

Boston Film Festival director Mark Diamond has announced that this year’s Film Excellence Award recipient will be director Ridley Scott, who has received Oscar nominations for Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, and Thelma & Louise. The award will be presented on September 7 prior to the screening of his Matchstick Men, which stars Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Alison Lohman, and Bruce McGill.

The line-up for the festival itself is not yet complete, but as of now it’s set to include Robert Altman’s The Company (with Neve Campbell, James Franco, and Malcolm McDowell), Tim McCanlies’s Secondhand Lions (with Haley Joel Osment, Michael Caine, and Robert Duvall), Campbell Scott’s Off the Map (with Joan Allen, Valentina De Angelis, Sam Elliott, and Amy Brenneman), Richard Schickel’s Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, Danish director Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself (a hit at this year’s Berlin Film Festival), Roberta Torre’s Angela (from Italy), Maria von Heland’s Big Girls Don’t Cry (from Germany), Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings (from Israel), JosŽ Padiha’s Bus (from Brazil), and Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me (a Spain/Canada co-production).

Now in its 19th year, the Boston Film Festival will run September 5 through 14, with some 40 feature films and 25 shorts from more than 15 countries. For the latest information, visit bostonfilmfestival.org.

Independent Film Festival of Boston 2004

The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which made its debut this past May 1 through 4, has put out a call for entries for next year’s fest, which will be held April 29 through May 2. Filmmakers, including students and first-time directors, are invited to submit features, documentaries, and short films that are "life-changing, thought-provoking, deal with real emotion, or expose an aspect of life in a new way."

The IFFB is organized by the non-profit Independent Film Society of Boston, Inc., which also presents informative seminars, summer workshops, summer outdoor screenings, and other special events. The 2003 festival showcased 40 films to some 10,000 attendees, and the festival jury awarded six films a total of $15,000 in goods and services. Our "Film Culture" columnist, Gerald Peary, was duly impressed. "With the tiniest amount of funding and an all-volunteer crew," he wrote in the May 2 Phoenix, "the Independent Fest has plunged ahead with an admirably ambitious, pleasingly artistic program of recent US-made indies — features, shorts, documentaries — none of which has earned theatrical distribution. . . . After sampling a dozen pictures, I can endorse the Boston Independent Film Festival as a significant showcase for underappreciated film and video work from across America." Seconding Gerry’s comments was Lee Miller, director of the 2003 IFFB documentary Real Time: "It was the best festival. These guys had their act more together than folks who’ve been running festivals for 10 years. The film selection was great and the filmmakers were treated so well. It really makes up for our suffering. I think IFFB could grow to be a major art-house festival. If IFFB maintains the same spirit, philosophy, and leadership, the industry and filmmakers will start turning to Boston more as a filmmaking city."

Event locations are yet to be announced (last year’s screening venues were the Brattle Theatre, the Somerville Theatre, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre), but the 2004 festival will, we’re told, include "enlightening workshops, down-and-dirty panel discussions, and outstanding parties." For the submission form for IFFB 2004, please visit www.iffboston.org. For additional information or for any other questions, e-mail info@iffboston.org

"Katharine the Great"

The Coolidge Corner Theatre is offering one of the first of what will be many cinematic tributes to the late Katharine Hepburn with a Monday-evening film series. It’ll kick off August 4 with Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 Howard Hawks classic with Cary Grant as an absent-minded pal¾ontologist who’s pursuing a dinosaur bone and Katharine Hepburn as a free-thinking heiress who’s pursuing him, plus a dog named George (there goes that bone), a leopard named Baby, and another leopard who’s not named Baby and doesn’t act like one. On August 11, it’s The Philadelphia Story, the 1940 movie that resuscitated Hepburn’s Hollywood career. Directed by George Cukor from the play by Philip Barry, it stars Hepburn as heiress Tracy Samantha Lord, Grant as her ex-husband, John Howard as her future husband (we’ll see what Cary has to say about that), and James Stewart and Ruth Hussey as a muck-raking-magazine journalist and his photographer. Where else could you see Kate, Cary, and Jimmy in the same film? Tentative for August 18 is Woman of the Year. From 1942, and directed by George Stevens, it’s the first movie to pair Hepburn and Spencer Tracy: she’s a world-famous political reporter and he’s a sportswriter, and they work for the same newspaper. And on August 25, it’s Suddenly, Last Summer, Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1959 film of the Tennessee Williams play (Gore Vidal did the adaptation), with Hepburn as the Southern widow, Elizabeth Taylor as her traumatized niece, and Montgomery Clift as the doctor whose mental clinic will benefit big time if he’ll just perform a simple lobotomy.

All screenings will begin at 7:30 p.m. The Coolidge Corner is at 290 Harvard Street in Brookline; call (617) 734-2500.

Nutcracker 2003

We’re still waiting for those summer days when the livin’ is easy (rather than muggy and rainy), and Boston Ballet is putting Nutcracker tickets on sale. Well, it is a chance to get those front-row seats you’ve always wanted. This year’s dates are November 28 through December 30 at, as always, the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Here’s the schedule:

Friday November 28: 7:30 p.m.

Saturday November 29: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Sunday November 30: 1 and 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday December 3: 7:30 p.m.

Thursday December 4: 7:30 p.m.

Friday December 5: 7:30 p.m.

Saturday December 6: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Sunday December 7: 1 and 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday December 10: 7:30 p.m. (see below)

Thursday December 11: 7:30 p.m.

Friday December 12: 7:30 p.m.

Saturday December 13: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Sunday December 14: 1 and 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday December 17: noon and 7:30 p.m.

Thursday December 18: 7:30 p.m.

Friday December 19: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Saturday December 20: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Sunday December 21: 1 and 5:30 p.m.

Tuesday December 23: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday December 24: noon

Friday December 26: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Saturday December 27: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Sunday December 28: 1 and 5:30 p.m.

Monday December 29: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Tuesday December 30: 2 and 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are $19 to $77; call Telecharge at (800) 447-7400, or visit www.telecharge.com, or drop in at the Wang box office.

Corporate high-rollers should, moreover, note that the December 10 performance is "available for sale in its entirety." In other words, "Imagine a private performance of The Nutcracker for you and your colleagues. Boston Ballet is offering ‘Night at The Nutcracker,’ one magical evening for purchase by a generous corporate host, who will have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to stage the ultimate holiday party for 3610 guests." Our press release didn’t indicate how much this ultimate holiday party might cost, or whether you’d be allowed to rewrite the story line (Clara runs off with the Bear . . . ) or cast your favorite underappreciated corps members as Sugar Plum and her Cavalier, but you can find out by calling Henry Goodrow at (617) 456-6338.

Boston Theatre Works 2003-2004

Citing a $15,000 grant from the Boston Foundation, artistic director Jason Southerland has announced that, in its sixth year, Boston Theatre Works will be expanding its season, increasing the development of new work, and adding as the company’s managing director Nancy Curran Willis, who’s been managing director at Gloucester Stage Company the past two years and has directed The Laramie Project and Coyote on a Fence for BTW. "I’m extremely pleased by the dynamic mix of work we’re able to offer next season," Jason Southerland said. "We’ve got two riotous comedies, a wonderful Shakespeare play that hasn’t been produced professionally in Boston in over 20 years, and a magnificent, haunting new play about an aging Holocaust survivor who is facing the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s."

In recent years, BTW has garnered Elliot Norton Awards for its productions of Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales and MoisŽs Kaufman’s The Laramie Project. Here’s the 2003-2004 schedule:

September 19 through October 12 at the Tremont Theatre: Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare, directed by Jason Slavick, with Bob Pemberton (Elliot Norton Award winner) and Anne Gottlieb (star of The Laramie Project and Macbeth at BTW) in the title roles.

November 28 through December 13 at the Boston Center for the Arts: the world premiere of a new holiday comedy by John Kuntz, directed by Dani Snyder, with Laura Latreille (2003 Elliot Norton Award winner), Rick Park, and Mr. Kuntz.

February 6 through 22 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre: the world premiere of Conspiracy of Memory, by Steven Bogart, directed by Nancy Curran Willis.

April 30 through May 16 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre: the New England premiere of Kimberly Akimbo, by David Lindsay Abaire, directed by Jason Southerland.

May 17 and 23 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre: "BTW Unbound 2004: A Festival of New Plays."

For subscriptions to and information about Boston Theatre Works’ 2003-2004 season, call (617) 728-4321, e-mail info@bostontheatreworks.com, or visit bostontheatreworks.com.

Brel cream

It’s change-partners-and-dance time at Gloucester Stage Company, which has shuffled its previously announced season. Tom Stoppard’s Tony-winning dazzler Arcadia, which was to have played August 27 through September 14, was postponed when stars Lindsay Crouse (The Verdict) and Mary McCormack (Full Frontal), as well as director Michael Morris, became unavailable. Instead, Elliot Norton Award winner Eric Engel, who helmed GSC’s fine revival of The Subject Was Roses last season, will direct Pulitzer winner Donald Margulies’s literate two-hander Collected Stories, which is about a young writer’s appropriating material from her mentor, August 27 through September 7. The production will feature Elliot Norton Award winner Nancy E. Carroll (most recently seen baking various professionals into meat pies in New Repertory Theatre’s commendable Sweeney Todd) and Karin Webb. Then, September 10 through 14, the troupe reprises its stellar revival of the 1968 musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which was a sellout earlier this season. Elliot Norton Award winner Scott Edmiston directs the exhilarating compilation of the Belgian-born composer/performer’s greatest hits in a barroom setting you’d swear was a block from the Seine. Tickets are $30 for all GSC performances; call (978) 281-4433.


Issue Date: August 1 - August 7, 2003
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