The University of Wisconsin is gearing up for the taping of the â??Jeopardy! College Championship,â? a two-day event starting today that will highlight some of Americaâ??s brightest college students and put Wisconsin on the national stage.
It’s an answer-and-question game that sometimes seemingly takes a genius to win. But when it comes to explaining the success of “Jeopardy!”, well, that’s a no-brainer.
“It’s the simplicity of the format,” says Executive Producer Harry Friedman. “It’s a really solid quiz show that some days will challenge you because you are asked for information you don’t know, and then other days you will find information you do know and then can feel pretty good about yourself.”
For the next two days in Madison, it will be college students who might end up feeling pretty good about themselves. “The 2008 Jeopardy! College Championship” will be taped at the Kohl Center today and Saturday for shows that will begin to air on May 5. The University of Wisconsin will be represented by Suchita Shah, a senior majoring in neurobiology.
The choice of the UW wasn’t tough, Friedman said.
“It’s a great, classic campus, and we like everything about Wisconsin and what it represents,” he said.
Friedman knows this firsthand. His wife, Judy, is from Fond du Lac, and his father-in-law, Nate Manis, was on the UW Athletic Board from 1971 to 1975.
This week, the 2008 â??Jeopardy!â? College Championship will be recorded at the Kohl Center, making UW-Madison the ninth college campus to host the competition, and a Holmen High School graduate will be among the contestants.
The contest, April 11-12, will feature 15 student hopefuls from universities nationwide with their eyes on the $100,000 grand prize. Students hail from universities such as Harvard, Cal Tech and Georgetown.
We are less than 24 hours away from the first Jeopardy! show right here in Madison. And who else would stop by the set other than the show’s very own host, Alex Trebek.
“This is my first visit,” says Trebek. “I got in late last night and this morning walked through the rain.”
We got an exclusive interview with the host of the long-time running show, now in it’s 24th season, and Alex let us in on what life is like once the cameras go off.
The stage is set for one of televisions’ most popular game shows to begin filming in Madison.
Governor Jim Doyle on Thursday welcomed the cast and crew of ‘Jeopardy!’ to the UW-Madison campus. The show begins taping its college championship series at the Kohl Center on Friday. The Governor says it’s great to have the production here. Doyle says he’s a big fan and proud to have two Wisconsin students taking part in the production. UW-Madison student Suchita Shah and Marquette University student Danielle Zsenak will be among the competitors.
Last Friday was a special and memorable treat for this art critic.
The student art committee at the Memorial Union had asked me to be a juror, a judge, for the 80th Annual Student Art Show.
I agreed, and a week ago Monday I spent a couple hours with members of the committee and my fellow juror, UW art history professor Barbara Buenger, choosing the art for the show.
It was easier than we all had feared. Overall, the quality was terrific, so we did not have to compromise standards as we selected 42 works from the 147 that were submitted by students of all kinds, not just art students.
MADISON, Wis. — Movie fans turned out in force this past weekend to view a smorgasbord of independent films and world cinema at the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival in downtown Madison.
In its 10th year, the festival, which ran from April 3-6, continued to build on its excellent tradition and offered another strong lineup of diverse film offerings. More than 200 films were screened during the festival.
A Madison-area novelist, two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists, a UW composer and a UW economist have been named Guggenheim Fellows for 2008.
“We can’t say for sure whether it’s the most the University of Wisconsin or Madison has ever received,” an official at the Guggenheim Foundation said this morning. “But it’s a substantial, respectable number.”
When director Stuart Gordon went to college here back in the mid-1960s, the Orpheum Theatre was as much a classroom for him as any room on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
And the unrest he saw in the streets was reflected in the rule-breaking films he saw up on the flickering screen, from “Bonnie and Clyde” to “The Wild Bunch” to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“There was a revolution going on out in the streets, and there was a revolution going on right here on this screen,” Gordon told an Orpheum audience Saturday night at the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival. He and his buddies would often head straight to a friend’s apartment next door after a screening and stay up all night talking about the movie they had just seen.
The streets may be calmer now — really crowded, given the nice weather over the weekend, but calmer — but the challenging films and the post-show discussions continued as the film festival wrapped up its first decade.
The exquisitely rendered independent dramas and powerfully honest documentaries are all well and good, but what do Wisconsin Film Festival audiences really want to see up on the big screen?
Simple. They want more car chases and more Canadians.
At least, that’s the lesson that festival director Meg Hamel could take away from Friday’s screening of the tongue-in-cheek action comedy “Bon Cop, Bad Cop,” which drew a sold-out crowd of some 1,500 to pack the Orpheum Theatre. Hamel told the crowd that it was the largest for the festival in years.
â??Jeopardy!, Americaâ??s Favorite Quiz Showâ? came to the UW-Madison campus Thursday to audition students for the College Championship taping at the Kohl Center April 11 to 12.
University of Wisconsin students filled the Memorial Union Great Hall Thursday afternoon trying to qualify to be a contestant on â??Jeopardy!â?
Amy Johnson is a film festival junkie with tickets to 16 shows over four days.
“I like movies,” Johnson shrugged, standing in the Orpheum Theatre on Thursday night for the opening of the Wisconsin Film Festival, where she was buying a festival sweatshirt. She opened her day planner, which was jam-packed with movie titles, times and venues.
They are among the UW-Madison’s very best.
They may not get the rah-rah cheers, but for decades they’ve competed, too, winning prizes and honors along the way. The Wisconsin Union’s 80th annual Student Art Show opens this evening.
It’s not the best-known UW tradition, but the juried exhibition is older than the Field House, older even than Bucky Badger. This year the excellence of more than 40 student artists will be celebrated.
If a director left the Wisconsin Film Festival a dollar richer than when he arrived, he probably found the bill lying in the street.
The festival, celebrating its 10th year beginning today, has never been about filmmakers trying to secure big distribution deals or move that next rung up the career ladder. It’s been about audiences, programmers and filmmakers who appreciate challenging and eclectic movies coming together in the dark for a few days.
But in spite of that spirit, or maybe because of it, the Wisconsin Film Festival has hosted some films and filmmakers who went on to achieve some real notoriety beyond the festival.
It’s a busy week at the UW, and will be from now on, now that the second semester is winding up toward its end.
BACK TO EUROPE: Last week, the destination was Vienna. This week, it’s Paris.
On Saturday at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall, various UW faculty members from music and literature will present another concert in the European Capitals series: “La Belle Paris.”
In a new partnership unveiled Friday, Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton and State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster plan to spearhead a statewide task force that puts increased emphasis on arts education in Wisconsin schools.
SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — A traveling exhibit that will visit the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall chronicles how the Nazis persecuted tens of thousands of gay men.
The exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum uses photographs, pictures and artwork to document the horrors. It’s now at the University of Rhode Island.
UW-Madison freshman Adam Levin is familiar with the difficulties of educating people about hip-hop, especially on a predominantly white college campus.
Using the term “hip-hop theater” is particularly confusing to audiences who are unfamiliar with the elements of the genre.
“People think we’re rapping Shakespeare,” he said.
Stuart Gordon likes to get a rise out of people.
And if it involves blood and guts, so much the better.
“Shocking people, I think, is something that I enjoy, ” says Gordon, 60, director of the horror thriller “Stuck ” being screened Saturday night at the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival. “I like to do things that get people ‘s blood running and their hearts beating. “
Li Chiao-Ping’s choreography has unassuming, understated grace, with moves that waft of simplicity but actually require a dancer to draw on a deep well of confident, athletic technique.
Her message, often expressed verbally in tandem with moves that mirror the emotion of the moment, can be sharp. But it’s also punctuated with frequent, poignant humor.
“Dancing Between the Lines,” a two-hour collection of seven works presented Thursday night at the Overture Center’s Promenade Hall, offered much to ponder in body and soul.
A new task force will examine and advocate plans for the increasingly crucial role of the arts in education and the economy in the 21st century.
Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Elizabeth Burmaster announced the formation of the Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education at a joint press conference today at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
The task force will recommend policies and legislation about the role of the arts in providing a quality education for Wisconsin students. The task force will include arts, education, business, government and community leaders from across the state, and will address how Wisconsin might gain a competitive edge in the 21st century global economy by developing talent for innovation.
What scares Stuart Gordon?
You get the sense that supernatural horror doesn’t faze him, given that the Chicago-born director has made so many gleefully gruesome cult films, from “Re-Animator” to “From Beyond.”
And authority certain doesn’t unnerve him. When Gordon was a student at the UW-Madison in the 1960s, he notoriously put on a 1968 production of “Peter Pan” that featured nude dancers and an LSD trip. It was shut down by university officials after one infamous show, and Gordon was charged by the Dane Count district attorney with promoting lewd conduct.
But what seems to get under Gordon’s skin these days is the evil that ordinary men do when they think nobody’s looking.
If you traveled by air over spring break from the Dane County Regional Airport, chances are good you saw some memorable glass art that is on display through May 4.
That’s because “A Touch of Glass,” an exhibition of selected glass works from the Racine Art Museum, is on view at the Art Court at the airport. The Madison-based Tandem Press organized the exhibition, and Bruce Pepich, the director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum, curated the show.
It has been a very memorable semester for piano fans, due in largest part to UW pianist Christopher Taylor’s momentous traversal of all 32 piano sonatas by Beethoven, which will finish up in three weeks with three final concerts on April 16, 17 and 18.
Yet this week might just be the peak of the piano semester, given what’s in store.
Some major changes are in store for the new season of classical music at the Wisconsin Union Theater.
For one, the theater is returning to a classical-only series option for subscribers as well as a mix-and-match, seven-concert series that allows customers to choose from the classical, jazz, dance and world music series.
In addition, because of new rules from the UW Transportation and Parking Department, only season subscribers will be allowed to buy reserved parking for $5.
The filming of “Public Enemies” in Wisconsin has our attention because of the star power — leading actor Johnny Depp — but we also have a thick streak of independent movies coming through here.
Expect these choices to widen. The Milwaukee-based Marcus Corp. recently promised to show Wisconsin-made films on more than 600 of its screens. That means automatic distribution in six states, says Scott Robbe, executive director of the nonprofit Film Wisconsin, which works to reel in movie production.
“It will be a great help to independent filmmakers, who will be able to say ‘and I have guaranteed distribution’ of the finished product” as a producer or financing is sought, Robbe says.
The cult of celebrity and the commercialization of art are not unique to the West. In 19th-century Japan kabuki actors and high-priced geishas were idolized by commoners, and the sale of colorful woodcut prints portraying them became a big, competitive business.
Looking at Japanese prints today, you might not realize what a rough-and-tumble commercial world they came out of. Their formal elegance, poetic beauty and technical refinement suggest a more serene, creative environment. So â??Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900,â? an exhibition of many splendid prints at the Brooklyn Museum, offers a useful and informative corrective.
Organized by Laura Mueller, a doctoral candidate in Japanese art history and a curatorial intern at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the show presents 73 woodblock prints from the Van Vleck collection, a renowned repository of more than 4,000 Japanese prints owned by the Chazen. With 22 more prints from the Brooklyn Museumâ??s collection, the exhibition tells the story of a group of artists that dominated the ukiyo-e print business for much of the 19th century.
Madison bass player Richard Davis is pretty nonchalant about his role Monday night on stage with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
“We know each other from years ago,” said Davis, 77, who has been a popular school of music professor at the UW-Madison for 31 years.
….His Wikipedia bio calls Davis one of the most widely recorded bassists of all time. He has worked in both jazz and classical music all over the world and has recorded extensively both as a leader and sideman.
Marjorie Peters is “a big, important part of the reason as to why the Madison Symphony Orchestra is what it is today, ” says UW-Madison violin professor Tyrone Greive, MSO ‘s concertmaster and a friend of Peters since moving to Madison in 1979.
The UW-Madison Art Department is mourning the loss of one of their own. The art department announced the sudden death of Gelsy Verna, a painting professor, in a letter posted Wednesday on its website.
The University of Wisconsin art department suffered a loss this week when a professor passed away unexpectedly.
â??This world would be such a drab place without art. Iâ??m always trying to push people to be more creative,â? University of Wisconsin student and aspiring artist Nicole Ecker said when asked what making art means to her. â??Itâ??s my life.â?
Spring break next week will be a good time to go down on campus, find parking and check out the extensive show of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty art at the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.
I’d be interested in knowing what your favorite art work is and why?
Two local arts organizations — one that performs classical music and the other that exhibits fine art — find themselves about to expand their reach to national and international audiences.
The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, conducted by its musical director Andrew Sewell, has just released its third CD, which is its first recording to have a national and international distributor, the New York-based company VAI Records. The two-CD set features three early Mozart piano concertos — Nos. 6, 8 and 9 (“Jeunehomme”), called the “Salzburg Concertos” and composed in 1776, done with prize-winning soloist Adam Neiman — and the Symphony No. 38 “Prague” (1787). The recording was made in the Capitol Theater of the Overture Center, the WCO’s home venue, and was engineered by Madison-based Audio for the Arts.
The University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, in turn, has found itself the object of attention from two international art publishers that have expressed continuing interest in the museum’s world-class collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century colorful Japanese “ukiyo-e” (pictures of the floating world) woodblock prints.
These days, Russell Panczenko is a man on a mission who goes armed with both good and bad news.
The good news is that the membership of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art has a renewal rate of about 55 percent.
“That’s very high by any standard,” says Panczenko, the museum director, citing national statistics.
The bad news, however, is that the total number of museum members — about 1,200 — has remained at a plateau for the past dozen years or so, he adds.
For the first time in the history of the University of Wisconsin, musical groups Redefined, The MadHatters, Tangled Up In Blue and Fundamentally Sound will take the stage together, one group right after the other, during a new trailblazing show on Friday at the Union Theater.
The phrase “something for everyone” is horrendously overused, but how else can you describe the lineup for the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival? How else can you describe a festival that includes a documentary on old Apple Macintoshes, another documentary on Madison urbanites who raise chickens and “Planet of the Apes”?
Those are just three of the 220 films scheduled for this year’s festival, which will run Thursday, April 3, through Sunday, April 6, at 11 screens downtown and on campus, including the Majestic Theatre and Chazen Museum of Art.
Just as uniquely female sass can in the real world, the impudent, sexy chorus in University Theatre’s opening night performance of “The Bluest Eye” made the misery, irresponsibility and corruption of the world exposed by Toni Morrison’s words tolerable.
In his contribution to “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me,” UW-Madison alum Ben Karlin writes about his old girlfriend, Jill, whom he fell hard and fast for “in the waning light of life in a college town after you’re done with college.”
He reminisces about how they “walked hand in hand through the farmers’ market, envious of no one, living in the goddamn now.”
One question slowly built in his mind, he writes: “What if this is the person I never run out of falling in love with?”
Still, it’s not a happy tale, and he hints about this early on.
Opera entered Madison like a lion over the weekend, and locals pounced on the rare opportunity.
Madison Opera again sold out all its performances, but those who didn’t get in, or those who did but still want more, have another chance.
University Opera’s weekend production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” directed by William Farlow, runs through Tuesday and offers an opportunity to see some fresh talent and likely future stars.
Sixty-six: Number of young women who auditioned in 2005 for three vacancies in Tangled Up in Blue, an all-female a cappella singing group on the UW campus.
2,251: Seats in Overture Hall, which the all-male a cappella group The MadHatters has sold out for its annual spring concert three times.
Two: Other student a cappella groups — the all-male Fundamentally Sound, and the co-ed Redefined — that will join Tangled Up in Blue and The MadHatters at Union Theater Friday for a first-ever “A Cappella Showcase ” to benefit Madison charities.
Quoted: But back in the 1960s, when Kathleen Horning, the director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was growing up, the pickings were slimmer.
Sunday evening, â??Taxi to the Dark Side,â? a harrowing documentary about U.S. torture policies centering on the 2002 death of an Afghani taxi driver, took home an Oscar for Best Documentary. University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy is featured in the film, which was based in part on his 2006 book â??A Question of Torture.â? McCoy revealed his experience with the film in an interview with The Badger Herald.
Score another win in the art world for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is a co-winner of the Best Online Archival Exhibit for a show about book bindings.
The College of Engineering does not tend to invite students to build bridges just for fun. The University of Wisconsin-Madison ‘s genetics department doesn ‘t train amateurs to analyze DNA as an unpaid hobby.
But for every credit the UW School of Music awards to music majors, it gives nearly four to non-majors. On Sunday three of the concert ensembles designed for non-majors, the University Bands, will perform.
Call it the Wisconsin Idea in music, the philosophy that the university should share its resources with all.
Last Sunday, the Academy Award for the best documentary feature went to a movie called “Taxi to the Dark Side”. And, this could not have happened without the work of a U-W Madison professor.
“It is a brilliant film. It justifiably won the Oscar,” said U-W Madison Madison Professor Alfred McCoy. “There is no question about it. It is a superb piece of craft.”
In January of 2006 McCoy released his book “A Question of Torture.” He got the idea after the pictures of Abu Ghraib first surfaced in April of 2004. He didn’t see the soldiers in those pictures as simply a bunch of bad apples. He saw sophisticated CIA interrogation methods including sensory deprivation and self inflicted pain
Just in case you haven’t had enough of winter yet, here comes the new art poster from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission that you can mount on a wall. The image on the poster, “Frozen-up, Sugar River,” is taken from a dramatic natural landscape oil-on-board painting by Belleville artist Jonathan Wilde.
…Wilde — yes, he is the son of the famous Wisconsin surrealist John Wilde — has been painting full time since May 1970, when he finished four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a zoology major. His subject matter has consistently been the birds and landscapes of southern Wisconsin, where his roots and passion lie. Wilde’s style is representational.
Sometimes these things just seem to fall into place.
Right now, there is a big revival of “bel canto” singing. Witness the new productions in opera houses around the world and critically acclaimed new recordings by mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and tenor Juan Diego Florez.
n May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.
In May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.
Keeping in that spirit, this week UW Opera will stage Donizetti’s last comic opera, “Don Pasquale.”
In her graduate student apartment on the UW-Madison campus, Sheri Williams Pannell â?? a woman with a knack for knowing what’s good for people â?? pours out a steaming cup of tea for her guest.
New tax credits have lured Universal Pictures to Wisconsin to film a Johnny Depp film about John Dillinger, Gov. Jim Doyle announced today.
Universal Pictures would spend about $20 million in Wisconsin on “Public Enemies,” garnering about $3.9 million in tax credits, according to the governor. The film stars Depp and Christian Bale and this week’s Best Actress Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard.
The film is being produced and directed by Michael Mann, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus.
MADISON – Gov. Jim Doyle today announced that portions of the upcoming film “Public Enemies” will be shot in Wisconsin. The movie will be directed and produced by UW alumnus Michael Mann and will star Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.
Universal Pictures reached agreement today with the Wisconsin Department of Commerce on tax credits from the new Film Production Services Tax Credit Program.
Part of a new gangster movie featuring actors Johnny Depp and Christian Bale will be shot in Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle confirmed Tuesday.
Depp will play the role of criminal legend John Dillinger in “Public Enemies,” a film by Universal Pictures and UW-Madison alumnus Michael Mann.
Women who exercise after a breast cancer diagnosis can improve their chances of survival, according to a study by researchers at several universities and cancer centers, including UW-Madison.
The six-year study indicated women with breast cancer who engaged in moderate to vigorous exercise had a 35 to 49 percent decreased risk of dying from the disease. Women who had the most physical activity had higher survival rates than those with the lowest level.
A research team including investigators from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health made the findings in a study published in the February edition of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
It’s been a long time since Tom Wopat appeared on the Wisconsin Union Theater’s stage.
“I think it’s been 40 years since I’ve performed there, ” says Wopat, who will star in the Four Seasons Theatre Company’s production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies” next weekend at the UW venue.
It’s a busy week over at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where more than Beethoven is happening.
It’s a busy week over at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where more than Beethoven is happening.
Maybe this semester should be called Beethoven time.
This week, UW pianist Christopher Taylor started his marathon cycle of 10 concerts of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas with three stunning performances, one last night and two more this weekend.
Ludwig van Beethoven used the keyboard as his “personal laboratory, ” a place to experiment with the lyricism and power that fed his monumental works for orchestra.
Starting 7:30 tonight in Mills Hall, UW-Madison associate professor of piano Christopher Taylor begins a two-month, marathon performance of all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas. In a feat rarely achieved, Taylor — whose reputation as a brilliant performer reaches from some of New York ‘s premier concert halls to West Coast academia — will play the sonatas from memory in a 10-concert series.
An 11-minute phone call was a Mississippi manâ??s ticket to spending the rest of his life in prison.
After a University of Wisconsin student and two friends made a documentary in high school exploring an unsolved murder case in Mississippi in 1964, the main suspect from more than 40 years ago was finally convicted.
