West End
A Booth Remains the Same At One-Time Beat Haunt
London, Paris and Tokyo Make Manhattan Look Cheap
Return of the Super Nanny— With a Spoonful of Sugar
Downtown Manhattan Now Among World's Priciest Office Markets
Midtown, as it often does, ranked high. The city's leading office submarket came in at number 24 in the world, with office occupancy costs of $62.07 a foot.
The Earth's priciest place to occupy office space? London's West End, where costs can run as high as $212.03 a square foot.
- Tom AcitelliWest End Café finally reopens ... as Havana Central
Hey Jack, how bout a mojito?
Albeit with a slightly altered moniker: Havana Central at the West End.
Dig it: Kerouac's favorite burger joint will begin serving Cuban cuisine next month, under the direction of new owner and Columbia U. grad Jeremy Merrin.
The historic Upper West Side bar--notoriously divided by the sign "Pigs over there, students over here," during the late '60s Columbia riots--was originally scheduled to reopen in September but got delayed by "construction complications," according to the Columbia Spectator.
The newly refurbished venue will commemorate its Beat-poet past with readings of Kerouac's On The Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl next Friday night.
Full beboppin' event details after the jazzy jump. read more »
- Chris ShottFree Speech and Non-Profit Theater: The Rachel Corrie Announcement
This seems a perfectly fitting venue. The Minetta Lane is a beautiful small space, it's in the Village, with a politically sympathetic audience built in, and which also attracts the kind of adventuresome tourists that made the play such a success on the West End. Seems like a good choice.And so the guessing game is over. Who knows what took so long. Waiting on the Public and other high profile non-profits? They must have passed.... But all along, a commercial mounting has seemed the only way to go with this controversial piece of material. No funders, no grants, no board. Just a committed producing team who doesn't have to answer to anyone. Could it be that such a model is the last best bet for guarantees of free speech in the theatre?
The big question a commercial production raises, of course, is... what about that "context"? One thing that most distinguishes the experience of going to a commercial production as opposed to a company is the absence of any supporting materials or, usually, post-show talkbacks. Commercial producers are great believers in letting the play stand for itself because...it's cheaper! Non-profits may get special grants and funding to cover all the dramaturgy and events they do around a play. So it will be interesting to see if Hammerstein and Pariseau make any gesture toward contextualizing at all.
