Conference suggests ways Broadway can be better

NEW YORK (AP) — A conference on how to make the Broadway experience better for theatergoers has come up with some prescriptions: Be brave in the stories that are told onstage and embrace youth and technology.

“Broadway, I don’t think, has boldly gone where it needs to,” said “Star Trek” actor George Takei, riffing off his old show’s motto. “I have a sense that Broadway hasn’t entered into the 21st century.”

The second TEDxBroadway conference on Monday brought together 16 speakers — producers, marketers, entrepreneurs, academics and artists — to try to answer the question: “What is the best Broadway can be?”

“We use the word ‘best’ because the goal of today is to go right past better all the way to the extent of what is possible, even if it seems a little bit outlandish,” said co-organizer Jim McCarthy, the CEO of Goldstar, a ticket retailer.

TEDx events are independently organized but inspired by the nonprofit group TED — standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design — that started in 1984 as a conference dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Video of the Broadway event will be made available to the public.

While the health of Broadway is good, with shows yielding a record $ 1.14 billion in grosses last season, some speakers noted that total attendance — 12.3 million last season — hasn’t kept pace, meaning Broadway isn’t always attracting new customers.

Three speakers — one the sister of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg — argued that new technology means the stage experience doesn’t need to be confined to the four walls of the theater and so can grow new audiences.

David Sabel, who has helped drive the National Theatre of Great Britain into the digital age, pointed out that broadcasts of his stage shows on movie screens across the world haven’t dampened demand at the box office and have actually have themselves become profitable.

“I think in our business, digital is uniquely not a threat but an opportunity,” he said. “What if we could open it up and invite a much greater audience in to speak with us?”

Randi Zuckerberg said the Broadway community could increase visibility by having auditions for minor parts via YouTube, have live tweeters backstage, offer crowd funding to knit people to productions, give walk-on parts for influential figures or even make the Playbills electronic.

“Why should Broadway be limited by physical space? By ticket prices? By the same shows, over and over?” she asked. “Instead of having just a small sliver of the world come to Broadway, why not bring a small piece of Broadway to the entire world?”

And Internet guru Josh Harris said producers need to open the entire process to the outside world, including video cameras backstage to capture actors getting ready and even having the orchestra pit filled with people interacting with the audience via their electronic devices.

The annual gathering centered on Broadway is the brainchild of three men: McCarthy; Ken Davenport, a writer and producer; and Damian Bazadona, the founder of Situation Interactive. It drew 400 people to the off-Broadway complex New World Stages and into the theater where “Avenue Q” usually plays.

Takei in the past few years has grown 3.3 million Facebook friends and leveraged them into audience members to “Allegiance,” his new musical about Japanese-Americans during World War II,

“If I can do it, Broadway certainly can,” the 65-year-old said. “Broadway is at its best when it embraces all of the technological advancements of the time and starts making a lot of friends on social media. Then, as we say on ‘Star Trek,’ Broadway will live long and prosper.”

Thomas Schumacher, the president of the Disney Theatrical Group, slammed the pretentious way some in the theatrical community look at more mainstream shows and scoffed at their disdain for making the audience experience more fun.

“Populism has its own manifest destiny and we need to embrace that,” said Schumacher, who called for a big tent of theatrical options on Broadway and especially shows for children who will return as adults. “What I ask you to do is embrace this audience and maybe even embrace the sippy cup.”

Terry Teachout, drama critic at The Wall Street Journal, soberly pointed out that 75 percent of all Broadway shows fail and then asked that more producers roll the dice on quality.

“If you can’t count on getting rich, then forget playing it safe. Why not take a shot at being great?” he asked. “If there’s ever a time for you to shoot high, this is it. Don’t start out settling for safe. Gamble on great.”

Kristoffer Diaz, the playwright of the Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” urged producers to embrace different voices, as they did with “In the Heights” and “Rent.”

“Women, writers of color, transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual — we need to keep hearing these stories. We need to hear them on Broadway,” he said. “It becomes a lot harder to dismiss somebody out of hand if you’ve spent a couple of hours investing in their story.”

Two speakers with specialty knowledge outside Broadway urged the community to not just focus on putting on a great show.

Susan Reilly Salgado, who has worked with famed restaurant owner Danny Meyer, said his success is not only about creating tasty dishes. Meyer, she said, makes the whole evening fun.

“To say that, in a restaurant, it’s all about the food discounts everyone else who touches the customer experience,” she said. “The best way to get people to come back to you over and over is to create an all-encompassing experience.”

Erin Hoover, the vice president of design for Westin and Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, said Broadway theaters could take a page out of the innovations brought to hotel lobbies, which are now comfortable, inviting and offer new sources of revenue. “The experience for the show really starts at the door.”

Customer service was also a theme touched on by Zachary A. Schmahl, an actor-turned-baker who created Schmackary’s Cookies in his apartment and has watched it grow into a thriving business.

“Customer service is something that people are missing in New York,” he said. “It’s so important in our single-serving culture to be that business that has a heart and a soul alongside a quality product.”

One returning speaker was Vincent Gassetto, the principal of a high-performing public middle school in a tough area of the Bronx, who urged those in attendance to make sure Broadway was on the radar of his best and brightest students.

“It’s in everybody in this room’s best interest that they have an awareness of this industry or we’re never going to win that talent war,” he said. “We’re all going to be competing for them.”

Though the speakers came from different backgrounds and emphasized different prescriptions, they did seem to agree with Daryl Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning producer of seven plays, including “Clybourne Park.” She challenged the crowd to think of Broadway in more than just dollars and cents.

“If we share the deep belief that theater matters, that theater can change us and ultimately change the world, then isn’t that the best Broadway can be?” Roth asked.

___

Online:

http://www.goldstar.com/tedxbroadway

___

Follow Mark Kennedy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan south of Houston Street, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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787 worst-case scenario: $5B writeoff by Boeing

As government regulators investigate Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and company engineers seek solutions, investors and analysts are grappling with the question: How much will the plane's grounding cost?

The answer depends on what probes in the United States and Japan uncover, with scenarios ranging from a quick resolution if a few defective parts have to be swapped out to a drawn-out inquiry that requires a fundamental redesign. The worst case scenario: The Dreamliner's problems run so deep that Chief Executive Jim McNerney has to write off about $5 billion in anticipated revenue, said Howard Rubel, a Jefferies & Co. analyst who puts the odds of that at about 4 percent.

The costs are likely to be much less, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, say investors and analysts, including New York-based Rubel. That would let Boeing, which reports 2012 earnings Jan. 30, reap the rewards of what he estimates was a $25 billion investment in the plane, clearing the way for a profit surge and more money for investors.

"As far as dividend growth, cash flow and share buybacks, I think that's still intact," said Gary Bradshaw, a fund manager at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, who added to his Boeing stake after a fire broke out on a Dreamliner Jan. 7.

U.S. investigators are still searching for what caused the fire in the lithium-ion batteries on a Japan Airlines Co. 787 in Boston that day and a fault that forced an All Nippon Airways Co. plane to make an emergency landing in Japan Jan. 16. The jet debuted commercially in 2011, and 50 have been delivered so far.

The grounding will most likely cost Boeing $550 million, Rubel wrote in a report with a range of potential expenses, from $125 million to reimburse carriers that lease replacement jets to the $5 billion writeoff. Doug Harned, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst in New York, estimated Boeing's expense at less than $350 million.

With probes under way by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, McNerney will face questions on this week's earnings call that he won't be able to answer. Chicago-based Boeing is due to give its 2013 financial forecast and delivery plans.

"We are working this issue tirelessly," Chaz Bickers, a spokesman, said of the 787. "At the same time, we are keeping our other teams keenly focused on their own program performance and customer commitments."

Earnings per share may rise more than 50 percent, to $7.69 by 2015 from $5 in 2012, the average estimate of four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Analysts project that Boeing garnered $81.7 billion in sales last year, which may grow to $87.9 billion in 2013.

The planemaker has said it plans to double 787 output to 10 a month this year as it pares a backlog of about 800 unfilled orders. That's one piece of the company's 60 percent production boost in the four years through 2014 to meet demand from airlines for more fuel-efficient planes.

"You look out a couple of years and they could be earning $8 a share, and then you really have a cheap stock," said Bradshaw, at Hodges Capital Management.

Bernstein's Harned estimated that Boeing had set a 787 delivery target of 93 jets for 2013. The planemaker gets a big chunk of the price before delivery, so even if 20 jets push into 2014, only about $1 billion in cash flow would be delayed, and that would be quickly made up, Harned said in a Jan. 22 note.

The shares haven't fallen further in part because investors are used to Dreamliner woes after seven delays pushed back its entry into service by more than three years, according to Carter Leake, a BB&T Capital Markets analyst in Richmond, Va.

In a worst-case scenario, the model may be grounded more than three months, which could force a production slowdown, said Leake, a former pilot who also worked for Canadian planemaker Bombardier Inc. While Boeing continues to assemble 787s, the grounding has halted deliveries, because buyers couldn't fly away in their new planes.

"The market is in a period of disbelief that it could be anything other than a quick fix, despite the fact that we're in an open investigation," Leake said.

Boeing felt the weight of investors' 787 dismay before the grounding. Through last week, the shares had slumped 26 percent since the day before the planemaker disclosed the first Dreamliner delay, in October 2007.

Any reworking of the Dreamliner would come alongside the development this year of the 787-9, a stretched version of the plane, and the upgraded 737 Max, which is scheduled to enter airline fleets in 2017. The planemaker is also working to develop a 787-10 variant and a revamp of the 777.

Concurrent projects have proved a risk in the past, with the Dreamliner's struggles spilling onto the 747-8 jumbo jet program. Its 2011 debut came two years late after Boeing shifted engineers to help on the 787.

The Dreamliner has long been pivotal to Boeing's product strategy. With the plane's promise of a 20 percent gain in fuel economy over comparable wide-bodies, Boeing markets the 787 as a way for airlines to fly long-haul routes without larger 777s or 747 jumbo jets. The 787-8, the only model in service, seats as many as 250 people and lists for about $207 million, though buyers typically get a discount.

The Dreamliner's early setbacks echo the "teething" pains common to new jet models, said Gary Flam, a partner at Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles, whose holdings include Boeing.

"The market in general is telling you there's some caution, but not tremendous concern yet," Flam said. "I've actually been surprised how well the stock has acted given the news."

In the 1990s, Boeing's 777 encountered delays in getting FAA approval for its engines, and some planes were pulled from trans-Atlantic flights because of power-plant issues.

Among additional early glitches was the delay of the 747's first commercial flight, two decades previously, also for engine troubles. Later, the planemaker had to redesign a rudder-control part on the 737 and replace it on all the jets.

"Boeing has a very strong record of being able to surmount these issues," said Peter Jankovskis, who helps manage $3 billion of assets including Boeing stock as chief investment officer for Oakbrook Investments LLC in Lisle, Illinois. "We remain confident in Boeing and their management and technical teams' ability to solve these issues."

Shareholders hoping for clues about the progress of that effort didn't get much when the NTSB gave a briefing last week on its "methodical" inquiry. The agency said yesterday that investigators found no evidence of flaws in the battery charger that would have caused the Boston fire. No problems were found in the auxiliary power unit, which contains the battery, either, the NTSB said.

Investors' support for Boeing and the 787 remains tied to the idea that the faults are in the lithium-ion battery packs, not a fundamental defect in the planemaker's most technologically advanced jet ever, according to Leake, the BB&T analyst.

"If, as this unfolds, it's anything more than a defective battery, then that confidence will start to wane," he said.

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2 dead after apparent carbon monoxide leak in W. Rogers Park

Two women are dead and another was hospitalized after an apparent carbon monoxide leak in a West Rogers Park building, officials said.

Paramedics were first called about 10:30 a.m. to the building, which is in the 2500 block of West North Shore Avenue, to transport one woman to the hospital, Chicago Fire Department spokeswoman Meg Ahlheim said.

The woman was taken in cardiac arrest to Swedish Covenant Hospital, Ahlheim said.

Fire officials at the scene called for a second ambulance, and a second woman was taken to Swedish Covenant as well, Ahlheim said.

Once paramedics became aware of the second victim, fire officials checked the building's carbon monoxide levels but found no indication of a leak, Ahlheim said.

Paramedics were called back to the scene, however, about 3:45 p.m., for another woman found unresponsive. The woman was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston in critical condition, Ahlheim said.

Officials checked carbon monoxide level again, and while the meter readings in residential units showed no exposure, officials found a positive reading for a low level of carbon monoxide near a boiler in the basement, Ahlheim said.

The Cook County medical examiner's office confirmed Sunday evening that it had been notified of two fatalities from the building.

A spokeswoman for Peoples Gas, Jennifer Block, confirmed that representatives from the company were called to the building to assist police and fire officials. She referred further questions to the police and fire departments.

The Chicago Police Department's Office of News Affairs had not been notified about the situation as of 10:30 p.m. Sunday night.

asege@tribune.com

Twitter: @AdamSege

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Vine Has a Porn Problem Because Of Course It Does

It’s actually pretty surprising that it took everyone three days to figure out that Twitter’s new cell phone camera-powered video sharing app, Vine, is perfect for porn. Vine has it all. It can record reasonably high quality videos of anything you want, on-the-go, and post it publicly for all the Internet to see. You add hashtags so that people can easily find special interest content. There’s even a little comments section so that you can share your thoughts about the distinctively addictive six-second loops. Heck, we’d be surprised if people didn’t immediately start to post pictures of their genitals doing what genitals do. They probably did, actually. Everyone else was just too busy watching pictures of their friends pets and children to notice.

RELATED: The Chinese Want to Know Why Their News Is on Twitter and They Aren’t

But alas, by Sunday everyone had noticed. Although it had already been mentioned on smaller tech blogs, the Vine porn problem started to become widely known after New York Times reporter Nick Bilton tweeted, “Friend: ‘So are people using Vine for porn yet?’ Me: “‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ Friend: ‘Check the hashtag #porn.” Both: “Holy ****!’” And the thing is, he’s totally right. TechCrunch published a post on the NSFW trick — #NSFW works for porn seekers, too, by the way — broaching the topic of Apple‘s App Store coming down hard on the adult-only content. It’s against the rules, see, and Apple has a history of yanking apps that become magnets for all things naughty. The Verge followed up a few minutes later with the headline, “Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about the get worse.”

RELATED: How Not to Get Censored on Twitter

This got us thinking: These App Store restrictions on pornographic content have been around as long as the App Store. Surely in the past five or so years, the moderators know a porn magnet when they see one. Vine is hardly the first video-sharing app to make it through the approval process, not to mention the many photo-sharing apps. (And Apple’s certainly not afraid of enforcing those rules, as we learned when it yanked the 500px app after it started to become home to “pornographic images and material.”) It’s no anomaly that Vine made through, though. As virtually every new video- or photo-sharing service has shown us since the dawn of the Internet, from Flickr to ChatRoulette, it’s very difficult to keep these sites or apps G-rated. So the companies either learn how to police it well, like Flickr does, or they wither and die, as ChatRoulette did.

RELATED: Twitter’s New Hashtag Project Sounds Risky

So it’s hard to believe that the App Store didn’t consider the fact that people might upload pictures of their penises to Vine. It’s more likely that they did and decided to see how Twitter would deal with it, when it became a problem. After all, Vine is not going to be the last video-sharing app to be built and it certainly won’t be the last porn-friendly app to be built either. So Twitter gets to play guinea pig and navigate the tricky terrain of moderating user-generated content in real time. It’s a good thing they already have a boatload of experience doing that on Twitter! See, look how fast they came up with a solution. A company statement reads:

RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter’s New Censorship Rules

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

Twitter being Twitter — that is, big proponents of the free flow of information — they stop short of defining “inappropriate” in Vine’s terms and conditions. Unlike Twitter, which has been free to operate on the whole of the Internet, however, Vine lives in Apple’s house now. If Twitter’s hands off policy doesn’t do enough to keep smut off the iPhone, Apple will surely pull the plug, and then, well — then we’ll be back to where we were last week.

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‘Argo,’ Lawrence, Day-Lewis win at SAG

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The CIA thriller “Argo” continues to steamroll through awards season, winning the top honor for overall cast performance at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

SAG’s lead-acting honors Sunday went to Jennifer Lawrence won for her role as a troubled widow in a shaky new relationship in the lost-souls romance “Silver Linings Playbook” and Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War epic “Lincoln.”

The supporting film awards Sunday went to Anne Hathaway of “Les Miserables” and Tommy Lee Jones of “Lincoln.”

“It occurred to me — it was an actor that murdered Abraham Lincoln,” said Day-Lewis, a solid front-runner to join an exclusive list of three-time acting Oscar winners. “And therefore, somehow it is only so fitting that every now and then an actor tries to bring him back to life again.”

The SAG cast win came a day after “Argo” claimed the top honor from the Producers Guild of America, whose winner often goes on to claim best picture at the Academy Awards. “Argo” also was a surprise victor two weeks ago at the Golden Globes, where it won best drama and director for Ben Affleck.

The award momentum positions “Argo” for a rare feat at the Feb. 24 Oscars, where it could become just the fourth film in 85 years to be named best picture without a nomination for its director.

“To me this has nothing to do with me, it has to do with the incredible people who were in this movie,” said Affleck, who also stars in “Argo” and accepted the SAG prize alongside his cast.

It was a brisk, businesslike and fairly bland evening as the actors union handed out honors to a predictable lineup of winners who generally had triumphed at earlier Hollywood ceremonies or past SAG shows.

“Now I have this naked statue that means some of you even voted for me, and that is an indescribable feeling,” ”Silver Linings” star Lawrence said after explaining she earned her SAG card at age 14 by filming a spot for MTV.

Hathaway won for her role as a doomed single mother forced into prostitution in the adaptation of the stage musical based on Victor Hugo’s epic novel. Her win came over four past Oscar recipients — Sally Field, Helen Hunt, Nicole Kidman and Maggie Smith.

“I’m just thrilled I have dental,” Hathaway said. “I got my SAG card when I was 14. It felt like the beginning of the world. I have loved every single minute of my life as an actor. … Thank you for nominating me alongside incredible women and incredible performances.”

Jones, who was not at the show, won for his turn as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens in the Civil War epic. The win improves his odds to become a two-time Academy Award winner. He previously won a supporting-actor Oscar for “The Fugitive.”

On the television side, with “30 Rock” ending its run, its stars Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin won the SAG awards for best comedy performers. It was Baldwin’s seventh-straight win, while Fey earned her fifth SAG prize.

“Oh, my God. It’s ridiculous,” Baldwin said. “It’s the end of our show, which is sad. Everybody is sad about that. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had.”

Fey gave a plug for the show’s finale airing Thursday, noting that it’s up against “The Big Bang Theory.”

“Just tape ‘The Big Bang Theory’ for once, for crying out loud,” Fey said.

“Modern Family” won for best overall cast in a TV comedy show. Accepting for the cast, “Modern Family” co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson offered thanks to the makers of “30 Rock” and another departing series, “The Office,” saying “you all have set the comedy bar so high.”

Ferguson joked that if the “30 Rock” or “The Office” stars need jobs, they should contact the “Modern Family” casting director.

The TV drama acting awards went to Claire Danes of “Homeland” and Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad.”

“It is so good to be bad,” Cranston said.

“Downton Abbey” won the TV drama cast award.

Julianne Moore’s turn as Sarah Palin in “Game Change” earned her the TV prize for best actress in a movie or miniseries. Kevin Costner won for best actor in a movie or miniseries for “Hatfields & McCoys.”

Fey, who memorably spoofed Palin herself in “Saturday Night Live” sketches, said backstage that Moore’s performance was “incredible. She really disappeared into the character, she did a real film acting job. You wouldn’t want a sketch acting job in that movie.”

Earlier, the James Bond adventure “Skyfall” and the fantasy series “Game of Thrones” picked up prizes for best stunt work, honors announced on the red carpet before the official SAG Awards ceremony.

JoBeth Williams and Scott Bakula announced the winners, noting the value of stunt players, who often are overlooked for their contributions to film and television.

“The stunt men and women of our union are critical to the work that gets done,” Bakula said. “They keep us healthy, they keep us alive, they keep us working. They keep our shows working.”

The SAG honors are the latest show in a puzzling Academy Awards season in which Hollywood’s top prize, the best-picture Oscar, looks up for grabs among several key nominees.

Honors from the actors union, next weekend’s Directors Guild of America Awards and Saturday night’s Producers Guild of America Awards — whose top honor went to “Argo” — typically help to establish clear favorites for the Oscars.

But Oscar night looks more uncertain this time after some top directing prospects, including Affleck for “Argo” and Kathryn Bigelow for “Zero Dark Thirty,” missed out on nominations. Both films were nominated for best picture, but a movie rarely wins the top Oscar if its director is not also in the running.

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” would seem the Oscar favorite with 12 nominations. Yet all of the triumphs for “Argo” leave the Oscar race looking like anybody’s guess.

The SAG honors at least should help to establish solid front-runners for the stars. All four of the guild’s individual acting winners often go on to receive the same prizes at the Academy Awards.

The SAG cast prize has a spotty record at predicting the eventual best-picture recipient at the Oscars. Only eight of 17 times since the guild added the category has the cast winner gone on to take the best-picture Oscar. “The Help” won the guild’s cast prize last year, while Oscar voters named “The Artist” as best picture.

Such past guild cast winners as “The Birdcage,” ”Gosford Park” and “Inglourious Basterds” also failed to take the top Oscar.

Receiving the guild’s life-achievement award was Dick Van Dyke, who presented the same prize last year to his “The Dick Van Dyke Show” co-star, Mary Tyler Moore.

After waiting on stage for a prolonged standing ovation to end, Van Dyke said, “That does an old man a lot of good.”

___

Associated Press writers Beth Harris, Christy Lemire and Anthony McCartney contributed to this report.

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Ariel Sharon Brain Scan Shows Response to Stimuli

JERUSALEM — A brain scan performed on Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who had a devastating stroke seven years ago and is presumed to be in a vegetative state, revealed significant brain activity in response to external stimuli, raising the chances that he is able to hear and understand, a scientist involved in the test said Sunday.

Scientists showed Mr. Sharon, 84, pictures of his family, had him listen to a recording of the voice of one of his sons and used tactile stimulation to assess the extent of his brain’s response.

“We were surprised that there was activity in the proper parts of the brain,” said Prof. Alon Friedman, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team that carried out the test. “It raises the chances that he hears and understands, but we cannot be sure. The test did not prove that.”

The activity in specific regions of the brain indicated appropriate processing of the stimulations, according to a statement from Ben-Gurion University, but additional tests to assess Mr. Sharon’s level of consciousness were less conclusive.

“While there were some encouraging signs, these were subtle and not as strong,” the statement added.

The test was carried out last week at the Soroka University Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba using a state-of-the-art M.R.I. machine and methods recently developed by Prof. Martin M. Monti of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Monti took part in the test, which lasted approximately two hours.

Mr. Sharon’s son Gilad said in October 2011 that he believed that his father responded to some requests. “When he is awake, he looks at me and moves fingers when I ask him to,” he said at the time, adding, “I am sure he hears me.”

Professor Friedman said in a telephone interview that the test results “say nothing about the future” but may be of some help to the family and the regular medical staff caring for Mr. Sharon at a hospital outside Tel Aviv.

“There is a small chance that he is conscious but has no way of expressing it,” Professor Friedman said, but he added, “We do not know to what extent he is conscious.”

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2012 stock report: Pains and gains

If you invested heavily in Illinois companies that provide consulting services, you had little reason to celebrate in 2012.

While the Standard & Poor's 500 index ended the year up 13 percent, most large businesses in the region that counsel other companies on how to improve their operations saw their stock prices drop.

Business support services was one of the few sectors getting clobbered in a 2012 Tribune ranking of Illinois and northwest Indiana stocks' performance.

Stock prices gained at about 70 percent of the 127 companies on the list, and about half outperformed the S&P 500. Bank owners such as Taylor Capital Group emerged from their 2011 doldrums, and Ulta Salon Cosmetics & Fragrance Inc. and Discover Financial Services marked their second consecutive year of soaring stock prices.

The year's biggest decliner, down 76 percent, was Groupon, as once-torrid revenue growth at the daily deals offerer started slowing.

Career Education was the second-worst performer; its stock fell 56 percent. The highly scrutinized for-profit school chain said it would close campuses and cut jobs amid sinking revenue and financial losses.

Sectors boosted by broad gains in 2012 included electrical parts and equipment, industrial machinery, and specialty chemicals.

Of seven Illinois banks on the list, all but one outperformed the S&P 500, with price appreciation of those six ranging from 16 to 86 percent.

In contrast, stocks of four of five professional services firms — Navigant Consulting, Huron Consulting Group, Heidrick & Struggles International and R.R. Donnelley & Sons — closed down 2 to 38 percent.

Each had its own set of issues.

Navigant's services, for example, include advising companies that face disputes, litigation and investigations, including government probes, as well as businesses that need help valuing potential mergers and acquisitions.

"You see fewer government investigations during an election year, as regulators are leaving their jobs, and they don't want to start new ones," said Tobey Sommer, a SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst. "Also, worries about the 'fiscal cliff' slowed M&A because CEOs didn't want to look foolish acquiring a company in September ahead of the fiscal cliff when they might have been able to buy it for 20 percent less in January had we gone off."

Meanwhile, Heidrick's troubles included a slowing market for executive searches. In early 2012, analysts expected Heidrick's annual earnings to be in the range of about $1.30 per share. It appears that it will earn closer to 57 cents a share.

Huron's earnings estimates during 2012 were also trimmed, to about $2.10 from about $2.40 a share as the timing of fee payments to its health care consulting business proved volatile.

"Its underlying demand is strong," but an increasing number of clients had signed contracts where a larger portion of revenue was contingent on the outcome of Huron's consulting work, said Randle Reece, analyst with Avondale Partners LLC. That made it harder for the company and the analysts who cover it to predict the timing of revenues, since they are deferred.

For investors interested in "Dumpster diving," Morningstar Inc. considers Exelon, WMS Industries and Caterpillar to be high quality yet undervalued this year, said Heather Brilliant, chief equities strategist.

Navigant is among the region's beaten-down stocks liked by stock research firm EVA Dimensions LLC. "Its fundamentals are improving, and it's really cheap," said EVA analyst Andrew Zamfotis.

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Man, 38, fatally shot in city's 6th homicide of the day

A 38-year-old man was killed in the Englewood neighborhood tonight, making him the sixth person shot dead today, police said.

The latest shooting happened about 10:05 p.m. in the 7000 block of South Carpenter Street, Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Ron Gaines said.

The man died on the scene, Gaines said.

Earlier, in the second double homicide of the day, a 16-year-old boy and a 32-year-old man were gunned down in the West Garfield Park neighborhood about 5 p.m., police said.

Officers responded to a call of a person shot in the 4200 block of West Congress Parkway and found the two lying dead outside on the ground, according to the police.

Both victims lived in Chicago, police said. 

No one has been arrested.

Police had the crime scene near Genevieve Melody Elementary School taped off at least one block to the north, east and west, while neighbors milled about to get a better look.

On West Van Buren Street, a body could be scene lying in the roadway, near the curb and a bus stop.

A man who only identified himself as the teen victim's uncle said the boy, whose family lived nearby, had simply gone to run an errand.

"He was just going to the store," the man said. "They just killed him just like that."

Later, the man paced back and forth on the sidewalk, shaking his head in disbelief.

"He goes to school and everything," he said to a police officer.

This man and the boy were the 4th and 5th people killed today, and the shooting was the city's second double homicide.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

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Opera about Nazi atrocity shown in Austria

VIENNA (AP) — Thousands of children were murdered by the Nazis because they fell short of the Aryan ideal. On Friday, a hushed audience gathered in Austria’s Parliament to watch the world premiere of an opera depicting how the Nazis methodically killed mentally or physically deficient children at a Vienna hospital during World War II.

The killings were part of a greater campaign that led to the deaths of about 75,000 people — homosexuals, the handicapped, or others the Nazis called “unworthy lives” — and served as a prelude to the Holocaust.

Austrians played a huge role in these and other atrocities of the era — nearly 800 children were killed at Vienna’s Spiegelgrund psychiatric ward — and Friday’s premiere of the opera “Spiegelgrund” was the latest installment of a national effort to atone for such acts in word and deed.

The timing was picked to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, which will be observed worldwide Sunday, and the performance was streamed live on the Internet for international audiences. But the parliamentary venue was chosen for a particularly Austrian reason: as a reminder of how the country’s politicians fomented the atmosphere of intolerance and authoritarianism that allowed Hitler’s troops to walk in in 1938, and a determination to not let history repeat itself.

Composer Peter Androsch said his focus on the era was in part born of his own family’s history. His great grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp. Androsch said the fact that that was hidden for generations “says a lot about conditions in totalitarian regimes and should serve as a reminder for me and many others.”

At the premiere — a hauntingly effective hour-long performance — legislators were joined in the audience by diplomats, Holocaust survivors, former Spiegelgrund patients and other invited guests in an ornate chamber lined with Ionic columns and used for special legislative sessions.

Spiegelgrund survivor Friedrich Zavel was in the audience. He was brought to the clinic in 1940 after being accused of homosexuality. Now 83, he still shudders when he speaks of his ordeals: humiliation, solitary confinement and torture.

The “Wrap Treatment” consisted of orderlies binding a child first in two sheets soaked in ice water, then two dry sheets, followed by waiting for days without food and drink until the body warmth dried the sheets. There also were beatings and injections that either made the child vomit or left him unable to walk for days.

Asked Friday how he felt about the wrongs done to him, Zavel said: “I know neither revenge nor hate.”

The opera itself was more of an oratory. Backlit in gloomy purple and red, and accompanied by strings, flute, percussion and a harpsichord, a trio slipped into each other’s roles in an allegorical depiction of how all are victims and perpetrators.

Thus a white-coated doctor embodying “The Law” switched from vocalizing about Sparta’s doctrine of letting weak newborns die to singing a child’s ditty before moving to the role of “Memory” — singing broken phrases that harken back to the horrific experiences of the victimized children. The two other singers shifted roles accordingly as a narrator dryly recited facts reflecting the atrocities committed.

“On some days, so many children were killed that the orderlies had to pile the little bodies on a wheelbarrow,” narrator Karl Sibelius intones in one sequence before reading a letter from a mother addressed to an institute doctor and pleading for the return of her son.

Bass Robert Holzer was “The Law,” and sopranos Katerina Beranova and Alexandra Diesterhoeft sang “Memory” and “Children’s Song” respectively. All were very solid.

Parliament President Barbara Prammer said the nation could no longer focus only on glorifying its past.

“We can’t choose our history,” she told The Associated Press.

___

AP video journalist Philipp Jenne contributed.

___

Online: www.sonostream.tv

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