The Week in Review

TAIT Acquires Stage Technologies: It is one of the biggest shockers in a year filled with unexpected events. TAIT, the staging and automation specialist, has acquired one of its main competitors, Stage Technologies, as well as Delstar Engineering, the maker of staging products. This means that Tait, which merged with Fisher Technical Services in 2010, is positioned to take on projects around the globe. Stage Technologies has long had a presence in London's West End and is a regular supplier to Cirque du Soleil. Combined with Tait's role as a leading supplier to big-ticket concert touring shows and Las Vegas spectacles, the newly merged entity is poised for world dominance. (Interestingly, neither company has ever cracked the Broadway market.) In the last couple of years, Stage Technologies has worked hard to make the point that it wasn't only involved in big-budget projects, that it also supplied its share of high school and church projects. It will be interesting to see if this approach continues or if the new Tait will be all about world-class spectacles. For more: http://plasa.me/kj108.

Hollywood to Broadway -- The Traffic Increases: Here's the most fascinating fact of the week. What is the single most profitable property owned by Universal Pictures? Hint: It's not a film. Answer: It's Wicked, the Broadway musical, which has grossed a staggering $3 billion since opening ten years ago. It's no wonder other film studios are getting into the act, combing through their catalogs looking for suitable properties. This season, we're getting musicals of the film Big Fish, The Bridges of Madison County, and Rocky; Off Broadway, Little Miss Sunshine opens in November. The New York Times reports on all this feverish activity. http://plasa.me/ymyhz.

A Green Theatre? Not So Much: Back in 2010, we wrote about the renovated Henry Miller Theatre (now called the Stephen Sondheim), an old and disused Broadway theatre that got a top to bottom renovation. More accurately, an entirely new theatre was erected in the space as part of the new Bank of America building that was erected at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street. (The Miller's landmarked façade was retained.) One of the theatre's talking points involved its alleged status as the greenest building in New York, earning it the first LEED Platinum status for a skyscraper. Now, according to a provocative piece in The New Republic, it is alleged that the Bank of America building "produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan." It's unclear how much of this applies to the theatre itself, but the piece has much to say about the challenges of creating a really green building. You can read it at: http://plasa.me/atvth.

A Guilty Plea in Rebecca Case: In Chapter 758 of the ongoing saga of Rebecca, the musical, middleman Mark Hotton has pled guilty to defrauding the show's producers. Hotton claimed to have identified $4.5 million in available money from investors who, as it turned out, didn't exist. Hotton "was to get more than $60,000 in fees and commissions for the introduction," according to the unsealed complaint. The revelation resulted in the shutdown of the production, resulting in the loss of at least 100 jobs related to the musical. As we noted last week, Ben Sprecher, the show's embattled producer, has vowed to get the show on. For more, including speculation about Hotton's sentencing, go to http://plasa.me/0gyhy.

Congressional Protection for Wireless Microphones: Representative Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Illinois, has introduced H.R. 2911, The Wireless Microphone Users Interference Protection Act of 2013. In the bill, Rush "outlines his concern for the ability of [various] venues to continue providing high quality, professional audio for their activities and events. With further auction of UHF spectrum pending, the bill advocates for maintaining existing protective spectrum allocation measures and also calls for the expansion of eligibility for specific wireless microphone users to obtain licenses." Given the state of the House of Representatives these days, we'll see what happens. The news came in a press release from Shure, which is based in Illinois. We assume that Shure has been working to impress on Rush the importance of this issue. http://plasa.me/u4sv2

Bayreuth's New Ring Cycle Bombs: "I have spent many years in many opera houses and I have heard booing there many times. I have heard booing, in particular, in German opera houses, places in which the tradition of making your disapproval clear when the curtain falls sometimes seems to be as reflexive and automatic as the volleys of bravos during the most humdrum performance at New York's Metropolitan Opera. But I have never heard booing that matched the loudness and endurance from the outraged audience at this week's Bayreuth festival." So writes Martin Kettle in The Guardian. The director Frank Castorf's bizarre new production is earning jeers for such items as "a Rheingold set in a Route 66 US gas station and motel inhabited by Tarantino-style characters, and a Walküre set in the Caspian oil fields just before the Russian revolution." Other critics have agreed with Kettle that coherence was not a major concern of Castorf's. Even in a world of weird opera production concepts, this sounds like one for the books. For more, including a photo of the set that features a new version of Mount Rushmore adorned with images of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Mao, go to http://plasa.me/y3h0z. For more, including a description of the on-stage copulating crocodiles -- you read that right -- go to http://plasa.me/l4hqz.