When it made its debut five years ago, “Xena: Warrior Princess,” a syndicated program about a leather-clad, towering, fantasy-age female warrior, provoked plenty of guffaws inside and outside the television industry. Nonetheless, the program became a phenomenon. It consistently did well in the ratings, finishing first among first-run, syndicated dramas the past four years. The popularity of its protagonist, Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, was an augury for the coming popularity of other very big people on television (professional wrestlers). But its syndicator, Studios USA Domestic Television, has announced that it is ending production of the series at the end of this television season, effectively ending an era. Executives there said they were doing so in large part because of major changes in the television world. Though the program could easily be shown on independent stations in prime time when it made its debut, the continued spread of the WB and UPN networks to independent stations has made things more difficult. Each of those networks has its own prime-time schedule, so there became fewer of the more profitable, nightly slots in which the Xenas of the world could be shown. Many stations moved it to more remote time periods. “It wasn’t paying off,” a spokesman for Studios USA said sadly.
— New York Times
LYRIC LEGEND WILL RETIRE
Danny Newman adopting a lower profile on the local arts scene? It hardly seems possible. But age catches up even with the ageless. The Lyric Opera’s flamboyant press agent and public relations counsel since the company’s founding in 1954 has announced his retirement at the end of the current season. Newman, 81, plans to produce an oral history of Lyric Opera and a book of reminiscences about his early days with the company and his colorful career as “pitchman extraordinaire” for the Chicago arts and entertainment business over six decades. His tireless advocacy of subscription sales as an audience-building stratagem for arts groups led to “Subscribe Now!,” published in 1977, long used as a textbook in arts management courses. In its 10th printing, the book currently is in use in 31 countries. Since 1981, when Newman ceded the position of Lyric’s public relations director to Susan Mathieson, he has been the company’s official subscriber ombudsman.
— John von Rhein
SUNNY DAYS AHEAD
Four architects from the Chicago firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz have been named the winners of a national design competition for a solar installation on a south-facing wall of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C. The architects — Martin Wolf, Mark Frisch, Devon Patterson and Duane Carter, who worked with the New York office of Ove Arup & Partners — bested a field of 115 entrants with their design for the Forrestal Building’s so-called “Sun Wall.” Their plan would replace an existing wall of concrete, roughly 100 feet high and 300 feet long, with a combination of electricity-generating panels and a solar installation that makes it more efficient to heat water to be used in the building. A spokesman said the Energy Department will seek funding for the design from Congress. Wolf estimated that building the project could cost anywhere from $15 million to $20 million. No target date for building the competition-winning design has been set. The Energy Department and the American Institute of Architects jointly sponsored the competition.
— Blair Kamin
3 MUSICALS GET `OVATIONS!’
The Auditorium Theatre Council is striking up the band again for its second season of “Ovations!” featuring staged concert performances of vintage American musicals. The three shows picked for next year’s schedule are: the 1938 “The Boys from Syracuse,” with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart (Jan. 31-Feb. 4); the 1946 “Call Me Madam,” with songs by Irving Berlin (May 9-13), and the 1968 “Promises, Promises,” with music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David (Oct. 3-7). Marc Robin and Kevin Stites will continue as the series’ artistic and music directors, respectively. All performances will be in the Auditorium, 50 E. Congress Pkwy.
— Richard Christiansen
MISS AMERICA FALTERS
There used to be a time when a network television executive could count on a few things year in and year out. One was that a sweeps month, ripped-from-the-headlines, made-for-TV movie would draw a very large audience. (Who could resist Alyssa Milano as Amy Fisher?) Another was that the annual “Miss America” pageant would have solid ratings as well. That is why ABC paid handsomely to steal it from NBC a few years ago. But things change. Blame it on presidential politics, conflict in the Middle East, the start of the new season or the evolution of gender roles, but the Miss America contest received scant attention this year. (Did you know that it was on last weekend?) When it was shown on ABC on Saturday, it received the lowest recorded ratings in its 41 years on television. According to Nielsen Media Research, about 8.8 million homes tuned in. The pageant’s second-smallest household audience on record was in 1998, when it was watched in just over 10 million households on ABC. It had its largest recorded household audience in 1970, when it was watched in more than 22 million homes, according to Nielsen figures.
— New York Times
