The nominations for the 25th Olivier Awards will be announced this week. Winners will be announced and presentations made at the Lyceum on Friday 23rd Febrary and will be broadcast on BBC2 later.
ROH Executive Director Appointed
Tony Hall, the BBC's Director of News, will replace Michael Kaiser as Executive Director of the Royal Opera House on 2nd April. This is the third of top posts to change hands: conductor Antonio Papanno replaces Bernard Haitink as Music Director in September 2002, and Ross Stretton will take over as Director of the Royal Ballet when Sir Anthony Dowell leaves at the end of the current season.
Sir Denys Lasdun, the achitect of the Royal National Theatre, has died, aged 86. He had been ill with pneumonia.
One of the companies expected to be part of Robert Bourne's Legacy Consortium, the probable purchaser of the Millennium Dome, has not joined the group. The McAlpine Group, one of Britain's biggest construction companies, declined to take up its proposed stake in the company and Bourne has therefore been forced to increase his own holdings. The Consortium is now made up of three partners: Bourne (15%), Bank of Scotland (5%), and Treasury Holdings (Dublin) (80%).
If the Consortium's bid goes ahead as expected, it will pay £125m for the Dome itself and 63 acres of land. The Dome will reamin in goverment hands until June when the Consortium will have to make an initial payment of £50m, and the remaining £75m will be paid over three years in what the "Guardian" describes as "what must be one of the biggest ever interest-free hire-purchase agreements".
Under the terms of the agreement, the Consortium will not be allowed to demolish the Dome for 15 years.
The government is adding a ten year profit-sharing clause to the proposed agrement: it will take 100% of any profits in the first year, with its share dropping to nothing after eleven years.
The Dome: Britain's Most Popular Visitor Attraction
The Millennium Dome was Britain's most popular vsiitor attraction in 2000, figures announced last week show. The total number of visitors for the year was 6.5m, slightly more than half of the projected 12m. Roughly one million of the total were non-paying visitos, mainly schoolchildren, but the Dome had more than twice as many visitors as its closest rival, Alton Towers.
December was the busiest month, with 737,300 visitors. Visitors spent over £400m on travel, accommodation and food outside of the Dome, and more than three quarters of a million were foreign tourists.