Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSIC INDUSTRY (90%); BOOK PUBLISHING (90%); PRINTING INDUSTRY (89%); MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS (89%); ALLIANCES & PARTNERSHIPS (86%); INTERVIEWS (77%); LITERATURE (77%); TALKS & MEETINGS (77%); RECORD INDUSTRY (71%); RECORD PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION (71%); JOINT VENTURES (69%); CALL CENTERS (63%); ARMIES (50%); BUSINESS TELEPHONE SERVICE (50%); PUBLISHING (90%); BOOK CLUBS (77%)
COMPANY: SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT (82%); SONY CORP (66%)
TICKER: SON (LSE) (66%); SNE (NYSE) (66%); 6758 (TSE) (66%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS334612 PRERECORDED COMPACT DISC (EXCEPT SOFTWARE), TAPE & RECORD REPRODUCING (92%); SIC3652 PHONOGRAPH RECORDS & PRERECORDED AUDIO TAPES & DISKS (92%); NAICS512220 INTEGRATED RECORD PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION (66%); NAICS339932 GAME, TOY & CHILDREN'S VEHICLE MANUFACTURING (66%); NAICS334310 AUDIO & VIDEO EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING (66%)
PERSON: ALICIA KEYS (52%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BERLIN, GERMANY (91%) GERMANY (91%); UNITED STATES (90%)
LOAD-DATE: June 2, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Hartmut Ostrowski, chief executive of Bertelsmann, is planning a cultural makeover at the company. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MIGUEL VILLAGRAN) (pg.C1)

Left, Barbara Walters, whose recent memoir was published by Knopf, part of Random House. Bertelsmann also owns part of Sony BMG Music, which records the singer Alicia Keys. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL J. RICHARDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE -- GETTY IMAGES

MATT SAYLES/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (pg.C4)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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The New York Times
June 1, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Again, for the First Time
BYLINE: By BEN BRANTLEY
SECTION: Section AR; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1593 words
WHEN your high school English teachers talked about the rewards of revisiting the classics, they probably didn't mean musicals. Most likely they were referring to fat, dense novels (''Middlemarch,'' ''Anna Karenina'') and long, lofty plays (''Hamlet,'' ''Long Day's Journey Into Night''): works of weight, they liked to tell us, dragging out a favorite dog-eared phrase, with ''universal human truth.''

Weighty is not an adjective commonly attached to musicals, which were born to divert, to tickle. They came into existence as the paler, thinner cousins of light operas, for heaven's sake. Yet after experiencing, in recent weeks, the Tony-nominated Broadway revivals of ''Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific,'' ''Gypsy'' and ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' I'm carving out new space for these shows on my list of all-time favorite literary masterpieces, right near the top.

Granted, on the page the lyrics and librettos may not parse neatly enough to satisfy Miss Kapp, the woman who taught me to diagram sentences. But as seen in the remarkable productions that opened this year, these shows from different decades of the last half-century easily meet my checklist for great narrative art: complex and constantly evolving characters, a sense that what happens is both spontaneous and inevitable, and a sustained perspective that finds poetic patterns in our daily muddles.

Heck, I'll even throw in those Aristotelian prerequisites about self-knowledge and catharsis. These beauties have it all. Not to mention the sensual appeal that comes from feeling the quickening warmth of real life given stirring artistic form.

It's rare that the race for best revival of a musical is the sexiest category at the Tony Awards, which will be bestowed this year on June 15 at Radio City Music Hall. But what's most striking about ''South Pacific'' (first staged on Broadway in 1949) ''Gypsy'' (1959) and ''Sunday in the Park With George'' (1984) is how much fuller and juicier they feel than any of the newer musical fare this season. (Yes, there is a fourth contender for best revival of a musical: ''Grease,'' which cast its leads via reality television. Enough said.)

I much enjoyed three of the nominees for best new musical: ''In the Heights,'' ''Passing Strange'' and ''Xanadu.'' (The fourth is ''Cry-Baby.'' Enough said.) But it was on the diverting level that my parents might have enjoyed, say, ''Wonderful Town'' or a ''New Faces'' revue in the 1950s, or ''The Fantasticks'' a few years later.

Though they embrace musical forms unknown to Comden and Green (like hip-hop and rap) and a Latino and African-American perspective rarely evident in Broadway musicals until the 1960s, ''In the Heights'' and ''Passing Strange'' are also throwbacks to a more overtly sentimental era of entertainment, with hymns to Mother (and Grandmother) of which George M. Cohan might have approved.

Their characters -- even the self-portraits of the talented Stew, the creator and star of ''Passing Strange'' -- are largely drawn in bright comic shorthand. ''Xanadu,'' a droll reworking of a notorious cinematic flop from the disco era, doesn't have a thought in its fluffy head beyond wanting us to feel good.

That's fine. Broadway needs its fluff, especially the kind that doesn't go limp under a tonnage of special effects. (I'll take ''Mamma Mia!'' over ''The Little Mermaid'' any day.) What makes you want to keep going back to the most recent versions of ''South Pacific,'' ''Gypsy'' and ''Sunday,'' though, isn't the need for a cotton-candy fix. It's that you sense there's always something more to be gleaned from them. And that -- and this is the special dividend of live theater -- the shows might have grown even more since you last saw them.

What sets these productions apart from other fine revivals of recent years is how true they remain to the spirit of the originals while exuding a new-born freshness. The hit reincarnations of ''Carousel'' (1994), ''Cabaret'' (1998) and ''Sweeney Todd'' (2005) were all, in different ways, dazzlers. But each was shaped, first and foremost, by an intellectual concept imposed by a director (each, coincidentally, a Briton). The implicit message, at least with ''Carousel'' and ''Cabaret,'' was that in the late 20th century it was possible to be perfectly frank, to make dark subtext the main text.

The difference with ''Gypsy,'' ''Sunday'' and ''South Pacific'' is that they work entirely from within. There's no postmodern distance about them, no we-know-better-now wink. The directors Arthur Laurents (''Gypsy''), Sam Buntrock (''Sunday'') and Bartlett Sher (''South Pacific'') instead have demanded that their performers dig like archaeologists into the existing libretto, lyrics and music. And what treasures they have found.

With ''South Pacific,'' adapted from James Michener's stories of American military men and women far from home during World War II -- which, like the musical, won a Pulitzer Prize -- Mr. Sher doesn't apologize for such potentially dated elements as yesteryear's progressive political conscience or an unconditional belief in love at first sight. He scales up, though, the always implicit elements of wartime disorientation and of cultures in collision.

Michael Yeargan's beautiful beachscape of a set appropriately suggests a dreamlike isolation from conventions, a sense of a world in which old rules no longer apply, and only military discipline keeps people from sliding into anomie. But most important is the fear and uncertainty with which the cast members invest their characters, even in their most frivolous moments.

Kelli O'Hara's plucky ensign from Little Rock, Ark.; Paulo Szot's self-exiled French plantation owner; Matthew Morrison's battle-rattled Ivy League lieutenant: they're all trying to make sense of reactions they never expected to have.

Mr. Sher stages breakout songs, including the love duet ''Some Enchanted Evening'' and ''Bali Ha'i'' (performed by Loretta Ables Sayre as the survival-conscious island entrepreneur Bloody Mary), as double-edged studies in seduction, shot through with menace as well as allure. His performers seep emotional anxiety, the awareness that all bets are off in war, from their pores. And the show acquires a timeless visceral charge.

The same commitment to character is what brings such eye-opening vitality to Mr. Buntrock's interpretation of ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's meditation on art according to the pointillist George Seurat. Certainly the digital projections of Seurat's art coming into being are wonderful.

But they wouldn't count for nearly as much if they weren't backed up with the ensemble's ability to convey the different visions with which different people shape the world. Chief among these, of course, are Daniel Evans's magnificent double portrait of the obsessive Seurat (in the first act) and his American descendant, a conceptual artist, in the second; and Jenna Russell as Seurat's pragmatic model and lover (and, in the second act, her daughter).

But every performance in the show is blessed with thought-through detail that defines each character as an individual of conflicting needs and perspectives. When the ensemble sings ''Sunday,'' one of Mr. Sondheim's most diversely inflected songs, it's like hearing a storm of separate thoughts. The harmony -- spatial, visual, musical -- achieved by the Georges at the end of both acts is thus all the more moving in its transcendence.

If the performances are broader in ''Gypsy,'' adapted from the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and featuring a crackerjack score by Jule Styne (with lyrics by Mr. Sondheim), well, these characters belong to show business, a world in which success is built on the ability to make yourself seen.

This production's director also happens to be the man who wrote the original book, the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents. And though I saw and admired two earlier Broadway revivals by Mr. Laurents (with Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly), this one has a singular fierceness and clarity of vision.

It's not just that Patti LuPone is so commandingly intense in the central role of Momma Rose, the stage mother to end all stage mothers. It's that every character onstage is so obviously driven by an aching hunger to be noticed. That includes Rose's daughters, June (Leigh Ann Larkin) and Louise (Laura Benanti), and her lover, Herbie (Boyd Gaines). And for once, none of them easily yields the stage to Rose.

Everyone is fighting for love here. And the genius of this production is how astutely it blends garden-variety inter-family struggles for attention into the look-at-me competitiveness of the theater. Of course these folks sing their thoughts. That's show biz. And show biz, in this instance, becomes a magnifying mirror for your basic parent-child relationship.

Definitive is a dangerous word in criticism. And I hesitate to call these productions that, even though they're the best interpretations of these three musicals that I've ever seen. Definitive suggests set in stone. These shows all have a fluid, organic life that honors the mutability of great art.

Every time I reread ''Anna Karenina'' or ''King Lear,'' they seem different to me, because I keep seeing new things in them. What this season's triumvirate of great revivals demonstrates is that these shows have the innate richness and substance to sustain repeated interpretations in the years to come. Meanwhile they're as close to, well, definitive as you're likely to see in this lifetime.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSICAL THEATER (90%); MUSIC (78%); TEACHING & TEACHERS (78%); PRIMARY & SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS (78%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (77%); LITERATURE (77%); ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS AWARDS (74%); OPERA (74%); PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS (72%); REALITY TELEVISION (67%)
COMPANY: RADIO CITY ENTERTAINMENT (52%)
LOAD-DATE: June 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Doing the classics, above, from left: Jenna Russell and Daniel Evans in ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' Patti LuPone in ''Gypsy'' and Kelli O'Hara and Paulo Szot in ''South Pacific.'' (PHOTOGRAPHS BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.AR1)

The originals, from top, Mary Martin in ''South Pacific'' in 1949

Ethel Merman, far right, as Momma Rose in the 1959 ''Gypsy''

and Bernadette Peters in ''Sunday in the Park With George'' in 1984. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTHA SWOPE

BOB GOLBY) (pg.AR8)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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The New York Times
June 1, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Entrepreneur's Act of Faith Bred on the Gridiron
BYLINE: By KEVIN COYNE.

E-mail: [e-mail]

SECTION: Section NJ; Column 0; New Jersey Weekly Desk; JERSEY; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 885 words
DATELINE: Newark
ALONG a chain-link stretch of Frelinghuysen Avenue, in the shadow of an old red-brick housing project in a far corner of the South Ward, the brightest, freshest block is a new strip mall of the familiar variety that would hardly draw a second glance in many other places: a dollar store, a coin laundry and a Subway owned by a man everybody seems to know, even if they don't.

''Everything's beautiful,'' Altarik White said on a recent rainy evening to one more customer who hailed him by name. ''No problems, no problems.''

Mr. White's name has been widely known across the city for more than two decades, ever since he was a star running back for Malcolm X Shabazz High School who once scored five touchdowns in a single game and was, as he said, ''bigger, stronger and faster than everyone else.'' He set school records for rushing and scoring at William Paterson University, packed away his pro dreams after separating his shoulder at the Miami Dolphins' training camp, and then came back home to teach and coach football. In 2006 he led the Weequahic High School team to the state championship in its group, a jolt of good news at a school that had endured too much bad.

''When I had a football in my hand, there was nothing that could stop me from reaching the end zone,'' said Mr. White, 37, as the old-school soul he favors over rap played in the background. ''Instead of running over linebackers, I'm tackling business now.''

When Mayor Cory A. Booker gave his State of the City speech in February, some of the loudest applause came when he announced something far less dramatic than the drop in the number of murders: a loan to Mr. White from the Brick City Development Corporation that would allow him to open the Subway he had long been planning. Not downtown, where there were already several others, but in a neighborhood where national chains, and foods that haven't been fried, were in short supply. Mr. White's Subway opened in April, an act of faith in his city as much as of entrepreneurship.

''In our community, there's not a lot of healthy places to go -- no Whole Foods, no Stop & Shop, just a bunch of Chinese stores, hamburger joints and fried chicken places,'' said Mr. White, whose Subway is on the other side of Weequahic Park from the school where he coaches and works as a substance awareness counselor. Next door is Seth Boyden Terrace, a public housing project where a triple shooting took place last year.

''Who's to say that people, because they live in Seth Boyden, that they don't deserve good food at an affordable price,'' he said. ''What I say to people who say, 'That's a tough place,' is, 'Yeah, well, guess what -- it's a tough world we live in.' '' He knows just how tough it is: his father was absent for much of his youth and his mother died when he was in high school.

''So will we all just close our doors and act like it's not happening?'' he asked.

Opportunities beyond Newark have beckoned, including coaching in the National Football League, he said, but he has resisted. ''I'm not ready for players to tell me what they ain't going to do, and that's what happens when you get there, because you're just the coach,'' he said. ''Now when I bark a command, five or six people pop their heads up and they're ready to do it.''

His voice travels far in the store, too. ''Keep it wrapped up until she gets back,'' he told Shakia Standifer, 18, who had just made a roast beef sub for a customer who needed a quick cash-machine visit to pay for it.

''He treats you how life's going to treat you,'' said Ms. Standifer, 18, a Weequahic senior and the football team statistician, one of four students among his 10 employees. She is headed to Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison in the fall to study forensic psychology.

The last year has been tough on Mr. White: His younger brother, Shahib, 29, who played football at Rutgers and was an assistant coach at Weequahic, committed suicide last summer, and the school's beloved principal, Ronald G. Stone, died of a heart attack last fall.

He has lived for the past three years in Piscataway, to be closer to his young daughter from a previous marriage, but he has grown restless counting squirrels and watching deer from his backyard. He owns three houses in the South Ward and hopes to move back soon. He has begun to read the business section of the newspaper more carefully, discovering just how much coaching has in common with selling.

''I could sell white gloves to a nun eating barbecue ribs,'' he said.

When he was playing football he studied the films of the opposing teams, analyzing the defenses they would try to stop him with, and then lie in bed the night before kickoff, playing the game in his head, making his moves and seeing the yards pile up. What he sees in his head now are mounting sales figures, new stores -- he has plans to open two more -- and the difference one sandwich shop can make in a neighborhood that never had one.

One afternoon earlier in the week, some neighborhood boys drifted over and, as often happens when Mr. White is around, a football appeared. The parking lot became a gridiron. ''I don't run anymore,'' he said. ''I'm the spot quarterback'' -- the guy who stands in one place and throws passes, hoping somebody catches them.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RETAILERS (90%); AMERICAN FOOTBALL (90%); SPORTS (90%); PUBLIC HOUSING (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (88%); HOUSING ASSISTANCE (78%); GENERAL MERCHANDISE STORES (78%); CITY LIFE (76%); ATHLETES (74%); CITIES (74%); CITY GOVERNMENT (74%); SPORTS & RECREATION EVENTS (73%); COIN OPERATED LAUNDRIES (73%); CRIME RATES (62%)
ORGANIZATION: MIAMI DOLPHINS (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW JERSEY, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: June 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: PROPRIETOR: Altarik White in his Subway restaurant in Newark. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM CUMMINS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. NJ2)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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700 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 1, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Da Vinci, Retrofitted For the Modern Age
BYLINE: By JANET RAE-DUPREE.

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; UNBOXED; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 981 words
WHEN Thomas Alva Edison was starting in business, his first patent was for an automated vote-tallying machine to let legislators know instantly which measures had passed and which had been voted down. He sold not a one. It seems that legislators, accustomed to schmoozing and politicking right through a vote's tally, didn't want to speed the process.

But with the resilience he would show throughout his life, Edison refused to view that episode as a failure. Instead, he used it to set the stage for future decisions: He would pursue only those innovations that had a verifiable market from the beginning. He went on to earn 1,092 more patents and to become a symbol of American ingenuity.

Ancient history, right? Not so fast. True, Edison has long been revered for changing the face of modern civilization. But beyond the material aspects of his success, he demonstrated that creativity and innovation could result from a set of identifiable and repeatable processes.

Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Edison kept extensive notebooks detailing every idea he ever had and every experiment he ever tried. He established the world's first modern research and development laboratory, hiring teams of experts in things as diverse as model-making and chemical engineering. Not only did he invent the incandescent light bulb, Edison also created the electric power industry required for the bulb to light up millions of homes and businesses.

As entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives alike seek creative solutions to 21st-century business problems, the triumphs of Edison and a number of other historical figures are being revisited for the innovation lessons they can teach.

''I use historical figures as models to talk about leadership and innovation,'' explains Alan Axelrod, author of a new book, ''Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond,'' as well as the earlier ''Elizabeth I CEO,'' ''Patton on Leadership'' and ''Eisenhower on Leadership.'' Before video games and 24-hour television, Mr. Axelrod says, youngsters grew up reading biographies of famous people so they could learn from their lives and emulate them. ''We should turn more to these historical figures today,'' he says, ''because why not model ourselves on the very best examples we can find?''

Michael J. Gelb, a corporate consultant, is co-author with Edison's great-grandniece Sarah Miller Caldicott of ''Innovate Like Edison, '' a 2007 book. Mr. Gelb began his research of historical figures by turning to da Vinci, a childhood hero.

''His was a balanced brain in that he used the left and right hemisphere of his cerebral cortex equally and to their fullest, something I've tried to get people from DuPont and Microsoft and Merck to do over the last 30 years,'' Mr. Gelb says. ''Corporate executives today tend to be overly linear, logical, analytical. I'm trying to help them use their intuition and artistic capabilities. If you want to compete in the challenging world of international business, you can't just rely on half a brain.''

In his 1998 book ''How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci,'' Mr. Gelb outlines seven principles that he believes define da Vinci's work:

Curiosita, or curiosity, marking his insatiable quest for knowledge and continuous improvement.

Dimostrazione, or demonstration, through which he learned by personal experience rather than taking others' reports for granted.

Sensazione, or sensation, using the senses to sharpen observation and response.

Sfumato, a painting technique employed by da Vinci to create an ethereal quality in his work, showing his ability to embrace ambiguity and change.

Arte/scienza, or the science of art, which he demonstrated in his whole-brain thinking.

Corporalita, or ''of the body,'' representing his belief that a healthy mind requires a healthy body.

Connessione, or connection, for his habit of weaving together multiple disciplines around a single idea.

That last principle has been popularized by the educational consultant Tony Buzan as ''mind mapping,'' or nonlinear, radial diagramming of words and ideas around a main concept. Mr. Buzan studied the notebooks of both da Vinci and Edison while developing mind mapping, and it's a tool that Mr. Gelb often uses with his corporate clients.

Mr. Gelb says that one man, a chemist at DuPont, reported to him that he was reaching impasses on four seemingly unrelated projects and wasn't sure how to proceed. Mr. Gelb suggested that the chemist create a mind map of the projects side-by-side on a single, enormous sheet of paper. The man later wrote to him in a letter: ''The moment I finished the map and I surveyed the whole thing, a solution literally popped off the page. I saw a connection that I never would have made otherwise.'' The chemist later received a patent for the innovation.

''People think I'm a genius because I'm helping people without knowing anything about their particular industry,'' Mr. Gelb said.

Asked to name other historical figures who offer lessons on innovation, both Mr. Gelb and Mr. Axelrod rattled off lists including George S. Patton and Queen Elizabeth I. (Mr. Axelrod added Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.)

Each of these personalities responded innovatively to the rapid changes taking place around them, drawing on the expertise of advisers while continuing to build on earlier successes. Like Edison, who built new innovations on top of previous inventions, innovative leaders never declare an invention ''done,'' Mr. Axelrod says.

''Everything ultimately became the source of something new later,'' he says. ''It's like the difference between a rich person and a wealthy person. A rich person has a lot of money and buys things. A wealthy person invests in things that make more money. It's creating ongoing wealth out of your intellectual capital.''