Not to belabor the point (too late!), but a follow-up item I wrote last week about the Boston Herald and American Repertory Theatre artistic director Robert Brustein was incomplete (see “This Just In,” News and Features, June 1).

First, I wrote that Herald theater critic Terry Byrne was proven to have been “right on the money” last August when she wrote a front-page story predicting that this would be Brustein’s final season, and that the leading candidate to replace him was veteran director Robert Woodruff. Somehow I missed the fact that when Woodruff’s appointment was announced late last month, it was also announced that Brustein will continue until August 2002. Byrne tells me her information was accurate when she wrote it, but that Brustein and the ART later agreed that his tenure would be extended by a year.

More important, I chastised Byrne’s editors, Kevin Convey and Greg Reibman, for ordering her not to contact Brustein or the ART for comment in her original August piece lest the ART leak Byrne’s exclusive to the Boston Globe — something ART spokeswoman Kati Mitchell denied her organization would have done.

But I left out the best part: when the news became official last month, it made its way into the Globe a day early, thus seeming to prove Convey and Reibman’s point. Mitchell denies having leaked the story to the Globe, saying she was told the Globe learned of the announcement from its own sources at Harvard University, which is affiliated with the ART.

Issue Date: June 7 - 14, 2001