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For many people, the sign of a good musical is that you leave the theater humming the songs. But what are we to make of the recent onslaught of shows where you hum the songs going in? These “jukebox musicals” raid the song catalogues of singers, composers or bands (The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, et al.) to cobble together a score. While the practice of creating a musical out of preexisting songs goes back through music and film…
Pauline Moffat, executive director of the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival, expects a big turnout for this year’s two-week salute to alternative stage productions. The event takes over the Massachusetts Avenue Arts District Aug. 24 to Sept. 2, offering 228 individual performances staged by 40 theatrical troupes and presented at five different venues, including Theatre on the Square, The Phoenix Theatre and American Cabaret Theatre. Moffat hopes this season will bring a third year of attendance growth and take the event…
The high-stakes competition for control of Indiana Downs has entered the homestretch. And South Bend-based Oliver Racing LLC
is poised to win.
Local startup My Health Care Manager has found a faster way to get its elder-care message out. It has persuaded five local employers to direct their workers to My Health Care Manager if they need help finding and coordinating care for one of their aging parents. As of Aug. 1, law firms Barnes & Thornburg, Ice Miller and Hall Render Killian Heath & Lyman, accounting firm Katz Sapper & Miller and the Indianapolis office of the Publicis advertising firm all…
The Indianapolis Colts are back at it, and with their arrival in Terre Haute (which is French for “terribly hot”) comes the first round of predictions. Will they or won’t they back up their Super Bowl championship? Hey, we’ll all find out in the dead of winter, not the heat of summer … how’s that for not being either bold or profound? But words in the first week of August are just so much blah, blah, blah. So, too, as…
To make money on new software, sometimes you have to give it away. Thanks to that counterintuitive approach, tiny local IT startup Vyante Inc. has persuaded companies like Eli Lilly and Co., Roche Diagnostics, Dow Agro-Sciences and 5MetaCom to test the beta version of its new software, which tracks and measures the impact of their brands online. Vyante hopes eventually to convert the companies into paying customers. “We’ve persisted against the odds,” said Vyante Senior Technologist Benjamin Ranck. “It was…
Many of you who read this column know I do a number of things to make a living. I host the morning radio show at WXNT-AM 1430, practice law, write this column, teach at the University of Indianapolis and Ivy Tech Community College, act, perform stand- and most recently started doing commentary at WRTV Channel 6. I make a pretty good living and, with the exception of my son, who inherited his adopted father’s bad spending habits, I don’t do…
I’m standing in the Convention Center downtown, looking down sourly at my cell phone. The designers of the phone have failed me, and I want to know why. It was the IUPUI graduation last May, and the hallways were filled with thousands of people in fancy dress and black robes. I was trying to contact just one of those thousands, but I didn’t know his cell number. I knew he was there, and probably within a hundred yards, but without…
Almost overnight, the nation’s lending climate has tightened dramatically, and the timing couldn’t be worse for two Indianapolis companies. A pair of private equity firms are trying to line up billions of dollars in debt financing to complete their $5.6 billion purchase of locally based Allison Transmission from General Motors Corp. Meanwhile, locally based Finish Line Inc. plans to rely on debt to pay nearly the entire cost of its $1.5 billion acquisition of Tennessee-based Genesco Inc. Those deals still…
I had a boss once who was infamous for his adages, always having one of these nuggets immediately at the ready. True, he would occasionally misfire, tossing off a “let’s throw it against the wall and see what sticks” when the situation may have clearly called for something more genteel like “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.” But most of the time, he was right on the money. One of his favorites was the old “How do…
Working three years on one project can be tedious, but Mark Sims enjoys every minute he spends preparing dinosaur fossils
for display at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Sims, 44, works in the Paleo Prep Lab at the museum’s Dinosphere exhibit,
picking away at the dirt left on 65-million-year-old fossils.
When it comes to advertising and marketing, the city’s two tallest skyscrapers are Class A, all the way. But throw out that
notion at tax time. The owners of Chase Tower and OneAmerica Tower–and some of the city’s other large office buildings–have
successfully lobbied for lower building “grades” that save them big bucks on property taxes.
The 10 hotels either under construction or in the planning stages downtown would increase the amount of rooms in the city’s center more than 40 percent-a far greater number than the market likely could absorb, experts fear. The projects are largely in response to Lucas Oil Stadium, slated to be completed by August 2008 and an expansion of the Indiana Convention Center that will nearly double its size by 2010. If all 10 hotel projects come to fruition, almost 2,300…
Here’s a preliminary rendering of the Penn Centre development planned along Pennsylvania Street between Maryland and Georgia streets. The J. Greg Allen project is being designed by locally based Browning Day Mullins…
Profit is booming at Escalade Inc. thanks to growing sales of archery equipment along with fewer discounts on other sporting goods. The Evansville company said today that earnings shot up 105 percent, to $2.4 million, in the second quarter ended July 14. Most of the increase was driven by archery sales, said Chief Financial Officer […]
Premier Properties has unveiled some of the details of its $750-million plan for a huge mixed-use development at the southwest corner of 86th and Keystone Avenue. The project is called Venu, a…
Indiana State University in Terre Haute is among 39 post-secondary schools being investigated by the New York Attorney General’s Office for its student loan practices, reports The Tribune-Star. The New York attorney general is looking into whether ISU directed students to Student Financial Services Inc. regardless of interest rates the company charges in exchange for […]
Shelby County Councilor Tami Grubbs has asked Gov. Mitch Daniels, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and the Indiana State Board of Accounts for an opinion whether the Intelliplex technology park is operating properly. Grubbs wants to know if the Shelbyville park is operating ethically, legally and in line with state guidelines for Certified Technology Parks, […]
