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LATEST PROGRAMME |
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WEDNESDAY NIGHT
* When the new West End hit musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opened last week with the advertising slogan "you'll believe a car can fly!", a piece of a grafitti was said to have appeared at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford home, "And you'll believe a theatre company can crash".
Adrian Noble, Chitty's director, has his day-job as artistic director at the RSC, or did until his resignation today. Noble had been severely criticised for organising a complete restructuring of the RSC - including job cuts and the planned demolition of its main Stratford theatre - and then taking leave to direct a lucrative West End musical. When Adrian Noble spoke from Stratford, Front Row suggested that - to outsiders - it inevitably looks as if he waited to see if Chitty Chitty Bang Bang would be a hit and then got out.
Listen to the feature
* Many recent films take advantage of the fact that contemporary movie directors can achieve almost any effect they want through the use of computers and other technical perfections.
But a group of Danish directors have responded to his visual Christmas by creating a cinematic Lent. They respond to an art in which anything is possible by deliberately limiting what is permitted. This is the Dogme Vow of Chastity.
Four of these self-denying projects have so far been made - including Festen and The Idiots - and this week the fifth is released in Britain. Italian For Beginners is the first Dogme film directed by a woman - Lone Scherfig - and follows a young cleric who joins an Italian language class.
Italian For Beginners is released on Friday 26 April, Certificate 15.
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* William Christie is an American who has made his home in France and become one of the most respected interpreters of French music. Born in New York he studied the harpsichord and conducting at both Yale And Harvard then emigrated to Paris during the Vietnam War. In 1979, he set up there Les Arts Florissants which aims to explore and popularise French Baroque music by Lully, Charpentier and others. Front Row asked William Christie if he had ever suffered from the cultural parochialism of which the French are often accused.
Lully's Divertissements de Versailles, conducted by William Christie and performed by Les Arts Florissants is available on the Warner Label. William Christie conducts a concert of music by Lully at the Barbican in London on Tuesday 30 April.
Listen to the interview
* For the first time in amost 40 years, the American Billboard Top 100 - the world's most prestigious pop chart - contains no UK acts. Is this a freak week or has the famous cry of Paul Revere in 1775 been reversed in pop music and the British are going? Front Row asked an American in Britain - Paul Gambaccinni - to choose the British musical exports in that time which made him wish he had a different passport.
Listen to the feature
On Front Row tomorrow,
we'll be talking to the creator of The Simpsons cartoon Matt Groening and Germaine Greer reviews And All The Children Cried - a controversial play about Myra Hindley - at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
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