Directors

Center Theatre Group artistic director/producer Gordon Davidson will appear on NBC's "Will & Grace" Thursday. He plays a theater director who admonishes James Earl Jones about his performance and singles out a fellow cast member, played by Jack (Sean Hayes), as an actor to emulate. Jones, playing himself, subsequently attends Jack's acting class.

The Art Institute of Chicago, renowned for its eclectic collection that features the masters of French Impressionism, on Thursday named James Cuno its new director. Cuno, 52, the current director of Britain's Courtauld Institute of Art and former head of the Harvard University museums in Boston, will assume his new post in September. He replaces James Wood, who announced last year that he would leave the Art Institute after 24 years. Cuno was born in St. Louis.

The city has chosen David A. Lepo as its director of community services. Lepo, 43, was selected from a pool of 65 applicants interviewed by Griffiths and Associates, a management consulting firm hired by the city. He starts his new job July 29. City officials said that their top priority for Lepo is to find ways to make the city more business-friendly so that it can reverse slipping sales tax revenue of recent years. Lepo has worked for the city of Signal Hill since 1988.

The National Symphony Orchestra in Washington has chosen Christoph Eschenbach as its next music director after years of searching. The 68-year-old German conductor will start in the 2010-11 season after Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer completes his two-year stint as principal conductor. Eschenbach's initial agreement covers four years. He will be the orchestra's sixth music director. Eschenbach will also hold the newly created position of music director of the Kennedy Center. In that role, he will work with the president of the Kennedy Center and programmers to launch various interdisciplinary, themed festivals and other projects in which classical music is a core component.

Shelley M. Westmore has been appointed executive director of Girls Incorporated of Orange County, a branch of the nationwide girls' advocacy group. A graduate of UC Irvine's Graduate School of Management, Westmore was formerly assistant executive director of Orangewood Children's Home and worked with troubled youth through the Child Abuse Prevention Council of Orange County and the Orange County Social Services Agency.

Graying, 46-year-old Paul McCartney sat in his home recording studio in the south of England, watching his old partner, John Lennon, on a monitor. Lennon was recounting the cheer he used to lead the Beatles in, back in the days when the group was on its way up. "When the Beatles were depressed, thinking the group is going nowhere," Lennon said on screen, "I'd say, 'Where are we going, fellas?' And they'd go, 'To the top, Johnny!' And I'd say, 'Where's that, fellas?' And they'd say. . . ."

Director Peter Brosius takes theater seriously. He was assistant director of Germany's Schauspiel Koln in the early '80s. British playwright C. P. Taylor was a friend and mentor; among his teachers have been Charles Ludlum, Joseph Chaikin and assistant director under Brecht, Carl Weber. He created a body of Off Off Broadway work.

Marie Ishida, the new California Interscholastic Federation executive director, will be introduced this morning in Long Beach at the final Southern Section council meeting of the 2000-01 school year. Ishida this month replaced Jack Hayes, who had held the position since 1995. A former president of the CIF, Ishida is the first woman to become chief executive of the organization that was established in 1914 and is the governing body for high school sports in the state.

"Francois Truffaut," said the French director Claude Miller during a recent visit to Los Angeles, "was there as a friendly ghost watching over us." A year before he died, in 1984 at the tragically young age of 52, Truffaut and Claude de Givray had completed a 35-page treatment of "The Little Thief," about a truant teen-age girl who is for all the world a sister in spirit to Antoine Doinel, the hero of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows." ("Little Thief" opens Friday at the Royal.

Chief U.N. administrator of Kosovo Bernard Kouchner announced that he had suspended the director of a detention center after 15 Kosovo Serbs escaped from the facility, and warned that other U.N. personnel could also be disciplined. The 15, most of them facing charges of genocide or crimes against humanity, fled from the U.N. jail in the primarily Serbian part of the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica. Two were caught quickly, but the other 13 were still at large.