Copywriting Excerpts

NEW YORK CITY OPERA brochure
Loony Tunes. Some people think we're as crazy as a loon. Singers who can act?  20th Century masterpieces now?  Broadway musicals in an opera house?  Italian operas you can understand?  Yes. It's the critics who rave.  And audiences who go wild.  To bring you opera that's profoundly entertaining, City Opera goes to extravagant lengths.  Because we are crazy. Like a fox.

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY 50th anniversary souvenir book
Sunday, May 30, 1954. President Eisenhower was continuing his counteroffensive against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his charges that communists had infiltrated the highest levels of American government. A southern newspaper had responded to the Supreme Court's ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional by editorializing that "White and Negro children in the same school will lead to miscegenation... and... mongrelization of the human race." The United States, Great Britain and France were discussing an accord that would divide Vietnam into two countries, North and South. Gil Hodges homered to lead Brooklyn to a 5-3 victory at the Polo Grounds. And at 8:40 in the evening at the Henry Street Settlement in Manhattan, a 23-year-old dancer and five colleagues gave the first public performance of his choreo-graphy – a work called Jack and the Beanstalk. While the dance soon faded from memory, choreographer Paul Taylor became a giant. 

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER website
When Lee Luvisi plays piano, the words "elegant," "exquisite" and "patrician" leap to mind. "Thoroughbred" should too, because none of Mr. Luvisi's accomplishments – youngest faculty member in the history of the Curtis Institute; nationally sought-after soloist; Artist Member of CMSLC – would have happened but for an afternoon 50 years ago when his father placed a generous bet on a longshot at Churchill Downs, took his winnings to a piano emporium and walked away the owner of a Baldwin Concert Grand.

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER postcard
On October 27, 1917, 16-year-old violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz made his New York recital debut.
On October 26, 1997, 17-year-old violin virtuoso Hilary Hahn makes her New York recital debut.
We can understand your missing the Heifetz concert.

92ND STREET Y TISCH CENTER FOR THE ARTS brochure
A funny thing happened to Maxim Vengerov on the way to his Y debut last March. It snowed and it snowed and it snowed and it snowed. And then for good measure it rained. So now his long awaited recital debut is even more long-awaited. The forecast for his September recital: hot.

SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY brochure
Monteverdi’s heavenly Vespers transports listeners to a time when Shakespeare was writing The Tempest, Galileo was peering into his new telescope, Pocahontas was getting married, the paint was drying on Caravaggio's final masterpiece, and the King James Bible was about to be printed. With this transcendent 1610 work, the future priest helped transport music from the Renaissance era into a brand new one: the Baroque.

BIG APPLE CIRCUS annual report
In 1974, in the barn of an apple farm in Kent, England, American entertainers Paul Binder and Michael Christensen crafted a comedic juggling act that featured, among other exotica, a rubber chicken. They took their act, and their chicken, on the road, entertaining people on street corners all over Europe. Over the next 18 months, they managed to amuse a fair number of folks. But only a gypsy fortune teller with a wild imagination would have foretold that within a few years – following a brief custody battle over the chicken –what these two friends would juggle was an annual budget of millions of dollars at a world-renowned arts institution of their own creation, while entertaining millions of people with their dynamic vision of circus arts.

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY Playbill
Scudorama dates from 1963, when America was still in the grip of nuclear fear following the Cuban missile crisis of the previous October. Taylor intended this “dance of death” to be as dark as his Aureole was sunny. Anxious to begin work before the commissioned score was completed, Taylor set sections of the new dance to “Le Sacre du Printemps” and asked composer Clarence Jackson to match Stravinsky’s rhythms in those parts…. By the time Jackson finished his orchestration, Taylor and his seven dancers were already at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut, rehearsing for the world premiere of Scudorama on August 10. Jackson put his only copy of the score on a Greyhound bus to New London. The bus arrived as scheduled; the score did not. Lacking music, Taylor and the Company — including the young Twyla Tharp — elected to perform the dance in silence, relying on their muscles’ memory and the audience’s forbearance…. Three months later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and shocked Americans suddenly felt as lost as the desperate souls of Scudorama.

Taglines

FREED OF LONDON
The Principal Dancer's Shoe

DANCE MAGAZINE
The World at Your Feet

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY CONCERTS
History in the Music Making

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY
Fearless Artists. Peerless Artistry.

MAHAIWE PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
IMPACT Campaign

GINGOLD THEATRICAL GROUP
Wit. Wisdom. Activism!