NEWS
May 11, 2013 | By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic
If a night at the orchestra were a pure investment-return transaction, Lang Lang certainly gave Thursday's audience its money's worth. It's when the actual music entered the equation that things got a little dicey. You had to look past a lot to hear it. At the front of Verizon Hall stage, with Simon Rattle leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, the pianist air-conducted or air-trilled with an idle hand when Beethoven failed to give him enough to do, mugged all manner of facial expressions, and kept leaning out to look at the audience, as if to ask: Do you like this?
NEWS
May 10, 2013 | By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic
Now that the Kimmel Center has disassembled the imaginary time machine that long dominated its lobby, the Gershman Y across the street has something closer to the real thing: The reconstituted 1918 film The Yellow Ticket , which was partly filmed in the later-razed Warsaw ghetto and was one of the first cinematic exposés of anti-Semitism. Now on a multicity tour with a live score by violinist Alicia Svigals, founder of the Klezmatics, The Yellow Ticket will be shown at 8 p.m. Thursday (copresented by the National Museum of American Jewish History)
NEWS
May 2, 2013 | By Chris Palmer, Inquirer Staff Writer
In the 1840s, Benjamin "Big Ben" Jones of Baltimore was a fugitive slave living in Bucks County. The mountainous Jones - nearly seven feet tall, according to historical accounts - made friends in the region, but in 1844, he was caught by his slave master and forced to return to Maryland. Those friends from Buckingham, however, helped him return. After raising about $700, they bought Jones' freedom, bringing him back to Bucks County, where he lived until his death. Jones' dramatic life has been recounted in books and historical exhibits, and now will be brought to the screen in The North Star , a biopic set to debut at theaters in Doylestown and Newtown this week.
NEWS
January 5, 2013 | By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic
Like a grand diva who can't get enough farewell tours, Les Misérables , the stage musical version, is again on a tour stop in Philadelphia against many odds. This time, it arrives amid formidable competition from the current film version that faithfully follows the musical about oppressed masses and idealistic uprisings in post-revolutionary France. By now, the touring stage shows have a fraction of the scenery seen in the Broadway original. The film is lavishly produced with major stars and has a smaller admission fee. Yet Wednesday night's opening at the packed Academy of Music clearly justified itself, thanks to a bright, unjaded cast at the top of its collective game and exercising a freedom of interpretation not always seen in touring companies that typically seek to reproduce the original-cast experience.
ENTERTAINMENT
July 5, 1994 | By Joe Logan, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
It's rare, in the course of interviewing movie stars about their new film, that one of the actors leans over and smacks another in the head, then rips a soggy bagel out of his mouth. It's simply not done in most proper social settings, even among pampered film actors. But then, most movie stars aren't Jacob and Adam Worton, the blond, blue- eyed, 19-month-old identical twins who make their acting debuts - actually, their crawling, grinning and drooling debuts - in the new comedy Baby's Day Out. "WWAAAAAHHH!
BUSINESS
May 7, 2013 | By Diane Mastrull, Inquirer Columnist
In even the most functional family, there can be a painful something that triggers a strong emotional response, despite the passage of time. For the Benders, it's the digital camera. "Digital killed the family business," Ben Bender says. Yet digital just might be the route to a family-business revival, as well. Bender has become the region's only franchise owner for TapSnap, a social-media-equipped replacement for the party photo booth. To fully appreciate this cycle of commercial irony - a primary motivator of which was his cancer scare three years ago - a little history is required.
ENTERTAINMENT
January 25, 1991 | By Stu Bykofsky, Daily News Columnist
"Today is Black Thursday," Channel 6 cameraman Bob Kravitz said yesterday, the day Saddam Hussein had threatened a "rain of fire. " After almost a week in Saudi Arabia, Kravitz and Action News reporter Dann Cuellar have decided to sleep during the day and remain awake at night because "that's when he starts peppering us with his Scuds," Kravitz said in a telephone interview from eastern Saudi Arabia. "This was the first morning we didn't get a 'wake-up' call. We call it Scud awake," he said.
NEWS
May 4, 2013 | By Chris Palmer, Inquirer Staff Writer
Chaos was in the air Thursday night in Doylestown. About 5:30, two hours before a locally produced film about a runaway slave, The North Star, was set to premiere at the County Theater, the star and director were missing. The star, former Eagles linebacker Jeremiah Trotter, was stuck in traffic. He was supposed to greet fans and media at Rob's Bar before heading down State Street in a horse and buggy, but was behind schedule. The director, Thomas Phillips, who wrote the script and shot the movie in his home county of Bucks, faced a bigger predicament.
NEWS
February 13, 2007 | By Rebecca Nugent
Many parents in Evesham Township have found the recent curriculum changes in the K-8 district, which include the video That's a Family!, unacceptable. The reasons vary, and I can speak only to my own rationale. While I understand and support the schools' efforts to promote respect for all persons, the district circumvented this goal when it presented materials explicitly or implicitly endorsing one particular moral viewpoint over competing views. That's a Family! was produced not to encourage tolerance, but to aggressively advocate the normalization of homosexual behavior.
NEWS
September 21, 2012 | By Augustine Anthony and Haris Anwar, Bloomberg News
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan deployed its army to protect diplomatic missions in Islamabad on Thursday amid some of the most sustained and violent protests yet against an American-made film that denigrates Muhammad. "We have to do everything we can to protect foreigners in the country," Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told the GEO television channel, criticizing violence he said was an attempt to sabotage the government's call for peaceful rallies Thursday. "Is this the way to show respect to our Prophet?"