Tonight I'm off to see Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, about a theatre director who devises a production in a vast Manhattan warehouse, which fails to draw in an audience.
The director initially devised a production that would have two characters — the singer representing the mind of the dying person, a silent actor representing the body.
Come up with too short an event and you can't justify the ticket prices; devise an epic production and you risk losing chunks of your audience at the intervals or even during the performance - which has happened at some of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's cultural experiments.
The filmmakers devised a $24 million production budget, but Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, TriStar Pictures and Paramount Pictures wanted Coppola and Lucas to lower it to $15 million.
In 1995, when the treaty was extended indefinitely, the nuclear powers agreed to negotiate a test ban, devise a treaty to end the production of fissile materials, such as plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, and take bolder steps to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
There is strong incentive to devise a synthetic pathway for the production of valuable metabolites in a user-friendly organism.
Tresnjak and Dodge have devised an effective production concept, with a full-sized Victorian toy theatre serving as a stage-within-a-stage. (Yes, there are ancestral portraits on the wall in which the faces are replaced by chorus members so they can sing a song).
Here, customers pay $5,700 to $13,000 to learn about the finer points of wine production and then devise a plan for their own 25-case barrel of wine.
Seizing the opportunity Mr. Gilbert and his colleagues assembled a brilliant cast; devised a lavish, innovative production directed by Douglas Fitch; and mounted an inventive media campaign that helped to attract sold-out houses.
