RECORD-BREAKING PLAYWRIGHTS AWARD ESTABLISHED

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust has established the largest monetary prize ever awarded for artistic achievement in American theater, an honor announced today alongside a smaller — but still substantial — award for young playwrights.

The Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award will bestow $200,000 on a mid-career playwright, while The Steinberg Emerging Playwrights Award will provide $50,000 each to early-career playwrights. Each will be awarded biennially, the Distinguished Playwright Award beginning this September, and the Emerging Playwrights Award in 2009.

The winners will be determined by a committee including André Bishop of Lincoln Center Theater, Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater, Polly K. Carl of Minneapolis’s Playwrights’ Center, and Martha Lavey of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Staff Reporter of the Sun

PENNY STRADAVARI TO BE SOLD AT AUCTION

A Stradivari that was owned by violinist and pianist Barbara Penny is coming to the auction block and could fetch up to $1.5 million. Christie’s auction house says the 1700s violin, known as the Penny, will be offered on April 4 as part of its fine musical instruments sale.

Barbara Penny, who died last year, was the first woman accepted in the strings section of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. She was a soloist and chamber musician in ensembles throughout Europe, including the Bolshoi Ballet in London, the Festival Ballet Orchestras, and the London Mozart Players.

A 1729 Stradivari violin, known as the Hammer, sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $3.5 million, which the auctioneer called a record for any musical instrument.

Associated Press

CRANACH CANVAS ONCE BELONGED TO HITLER

Adolf Hitler was once the owner of a painting now in London’s National Gallery, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” the gallery said in a press release today.

The gallery confirmed the discovery made by researcher Birgit Schwartz, who identified the painting in a photograph of Hitler’s private gallery.

Bloomberg News

ALVIN AILEY THEATER MARKS 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will celebrate its 50th anniversary season with the usual elements (performances, exhibits, a video installation) and some unexpected treats (the reading of a congressional resolution praising the theater, a specially designed Barbie doll).

The 18-month celebration will include the company’s spring season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its winter season at City Center, as well as a series of free performances around New York City in August. At the Ailey Center on West 55th Street — which, as another element of the anniversary, will be renamed Alvin Ailey Place — artist David Michalek will install a video tribute. And at the Library of Congress, an exhibition of photographs, choreographic notes, and other documents will be on display beginning May 8. (The show will later move to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.) The Barbie doll, which will go on sale in November, will be designed by the company’s artistic director, Judith Jamison, and will wear a costume from “Revelations.”

Staff Reporter of the Sun

NEW DUTCH FILM ATTACKS ISLAM

A Dutch lawmaker who produced a film criticizing Islam and its holy book, the Quran, released the movie Thursday by posting it on the Internet.

The film by Geert Wilders cites verses of the Quran interspersed with images of violence from terrorist attacks in the United States and Spain and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street.

The Dutch government had warned that a film offensive to Muslims could spark violent protests in Islamic countries, like those two years ago after European newspapers published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. His movie begins and ends with one of those caricatures of Muhammad, accompanied by the sound of a page being torn from a book.

Subtitles assure viewers that the page was not torn from a Quran, but from a telephone book. “It’s not up to me, but the Muslims to tear the hate-sowing pages out of the Quran,” the subtitles add.

A Dutch judge was due on Friday to hear the petition of a Muslim group seeking an independent review of the film to see whether it violates hate speech laws.

Associated Press