Theatre // Current

Arthur Romeo

Highlight: We saw talented performer Arthur Romeo take part in Sweet Baby J'ai's... more

jellynoose
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14 days ago
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United Kingdom Talk Video Thursday 5th November 2009

Thursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show her on CURRENT TV... more

ChrisReardon
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17 days ago
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'Brighton Beach Memoirs" Closes on B'Way after 1 Week

To which I say, "Good." That play sucks. Sorry, Neil Simon fans.

St_Alia_10191
added this
20 days ago
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Breast cancer, second life theatre and musician mocking

In this edition we mark Breast cancer awareness month. Did you know men can get breast... more

Life_On_Line
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23 days ago
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4 comments

The return of Carrie: The Musical

The biggest musical flop too date, that lasted a run of only five shows back in 1988,... more

emmaboswood
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24 days ago
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Scarlett Johansson To Star in "A View from the Bridge" Broadway Show

Scarlett Johansson is set to follow in the footsteps of Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Hugh... more

Amy_Grindhouse
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26 days ago
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Microphones Create Controversy on Broadway (Seriously)

"On stage at the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" are seven actors—and 23 hidden microphones. The new musical "Fela!" has 80 speakers hung around the theater, and mic transmitters embedded in a character's tap shoes. And during one song in "The Phantom of the Opera," actors choose whether to sing along—or just mouth the words—to a prerecorded vocal track.

With theater producers increasingly reliant on revenues from touring shows playing spaces with as many as 4,000 seats, more shows are being rigged with miniature mics and high-tech sound systems to project the performances to the far reaches of the theaters. Sophisticated sound mixing systems can make singers' voices sound better than they would otherwise. And, unbeknownst to most audience members, some performers in musicals are occasionally backed by prerecorded vocal tracks, allowing them to sing quietly, or sometimes not at all, during strenuous dance numbers or scenes with complex effects.

Just as Bob Dylan was booed when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the theater community is divided over the growing manipulation of sound on stage. Manny Azenberg, 75 years old, whose first Broadway show as a producer was "The Lion in Winter" in 1966, agreed to allow hidden mics on stage in "Brighton Beach" but refused to put body mics on actors. "You lose quality, you lose intimacy, you lose the reality of the theater," he says.

Many theatergoers have come to expect the miking effect. Microphones on stage allow actors to speak more naturally, emulating the more realistic performance style that audiences are used to from movies and television. Audiences also expect entertainment to be louder generally, after years of surround-sound in movie theaters. Sound designers say it's necessary to turn up the volume on actors as Broadway theaters themselves get louder, with automated lighting and set-moving equipment making a continual background noise. "There's very little true quiet in the theater anymore," says Tom Clark of Acme Sound Partners, which is designing the sound for "Bye Bye Birdie" and other shows this season.

Playwright David Mamet is known for refusing to use any mics at all in his plays. It may be a losing battle. At a recent performance of "Oleanna," his play about sexual harassment now on Broadway, an audience member complained at a "talk back" for theatergoers after the show. Dennis Sandman, a 56-year-old financial planner from East Brunswick, N.J., said he couldn't hear the play from the balcony. "The actors should've worn mics," he told the group. "It's important when you have one of these talkathons to hear it clearly."

Stage sound isn't always invisible. Actor Pablo Schreiber was half-naked for much of "Desire Under the Elms," a fraught drama by Eugene O'Neill on Broadway earlier this year. Audiences seated at the front of the 1,623-seat St. James Theatre could see a battery pack in his long johns with his microphone wire running down his bare back.

Mr. Schreiber says initially he was opposed to using a mic, but later realized it helped involve the audience in ways an acoustic performance might not have in a large theater. During his character's love scene with his voluptuous stepmother, played by Carla Gugino, he could whisper to her and look into her eyes instead of projecting outwards.""On stage at the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" are seven... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
27 days ago
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Culture Clash, 25 Years Out

"A few weeks ago, on a fog-enshrouded night in Malibu, Richard Montoya stepped onstage... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
27 days ago
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0 comments

Is this the future which I see before me?

I like theatre. Generally, it only takes one really good play or musical to become... more

knews121
added this
27 days ago
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2 comments

Willem Dafoe = Strange?

"STRANGE is a relative term when applied to the work of Willem Dafoe, and yet when one looks at his fall schedule, it is also the word that jumps most immediately to mind.

In the art-house cinemas he and Charlotte Gainsbourg can currently be seen inflicting unspeakable violence on each other in the Lars von Trier suspense film “Antichrist.” Next, at the Public Theater, he will don a frilly 18th-century costume and lead a giant anthropomorphic duck around the stage by its genitals in Richard Foreman’s surrealist play “Idiot Savant.” After that he can be heard in Wes Anderson’s animated version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” providing the voice of a knife-wielding rat.

It may be convenient to classify Mr. Dafoe’s choices as strange because they defy easy categorization. The actor himself is not in any particular hurry to explain how his choices should be interpreted. “Nobody has to know what I think about what I do,” he said in his gentlemanly growl during a recent lunch in the meatpacking district. “In fact it’s very important, I think, for an actor to keep their mouth shut on some level.”

No deeper pattern emerges, either, from the body of film work he has built over the last quarter-century. Sure, he has portrayed some memorably unhinged creeps in films like “Wild at Heart” and “Spider-Man.” But that assessment does not account for his subdued performance in “Mississippi Burning,” his quiet heroism in “Platoon” or his comic turn in “Shadow of the Vampire.” And it ignores his parallel career in avant-garde theater, where his work has been even more unpredictable and unquantifiable.

Taken one at a time, each project is an example of an actor following his own idiosyncratic muse; together they have hardly anything in common except that Mr. Dafoe is in them.

In person Mr. Dafoe, a trim, sinewy man of 54, can be an intense, intimidating figure, owing mostly to a reptilian voice that can make the most banal utterances sound a little bit sinister. He is also endowed with a metamorphic face that at first appears skeletal but can communicate a spectrum of emotion with its bends and contortions. When he is deep in thought, the worry lines pile up on his forehead like sand dunes, and when he grins, his mouth appears to stretch beyond the boundaries of his face.

“He looks very much like the Batman cartoon — he looks like the Joker,” said Mr. von Trier, who previously directed Mr. Dafoe in his film “Manderlay.” “He can do strange things with his face that show he’s very much alive.”
"
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Read article for more. Share your thoughts."STRANGE is a relative term when applied to the work of Willem Dafoe, and yet when one... more

IndieArtist
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27 days ago
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Andrew Lloyd Webber diagnosed with Prostate Cancer

Andrew Lloyd Webber has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but it is in its early... more

smurph25
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28 days ago
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Drama group "Tarts" changes name after sexist complaints

An East Midlands amateur dramatics group known as the Tipton Amateur Repertory Theatre... more

sophosthegreat
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1 month ago
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The Trouble With Actor-Speak

Hadley Freeman writes, "Last weekend, with my brow raised high, I attended the New Yorker festival which was full of people talking, very earnestly, very cerebrally. In other words, it was like stepping right into the magazine, Purple Rose of Cairo-style. Perhaps because I got so carried away on this cloud of cerebralism, I did something I vowed never to do: I went to a talk by some actors.

I have always been interested in what I call actor-speak – and when I say "interested", I mean "intrigued in the way you might be by a man talking to himself, without having any desire to go over and engage him in conversation". However, while I continue to march past muttering men on park benches, I am, thanks to my job, an unwitting expert on actor-speak, having spent many hours of my life listening to actors bang on about their "love of the craft" and "the thing about [insert name of director] – he takes you on an emotional journey".

Some may call this argument prejudicial, but those who do have never spent a morning with Helen Hunt, listening to her expound on her skills. This has nothing to do with lack of respect for actors; just a lack of respect for the language they learn – perhaps at acting school – to describe what they do.

The New Yorker event sounded promising: its panel of pleasing scene-stealers included John Turturro and Joan Cusack. But when – just 10 minutes in – panel member and actor Richard Kind (you'll know him, look him up), said actors do theatre "to nourish themselves", I knew I'd made a grave tactical error. The verb "nourish" should only be used in a culinary context, and even then with restraint.

And, lo, they kept a-coming: there was "our craft" and "the journey one goes on". To finish, actor Christine Baranski announced that "acting is like creating life". Considering this comment came straight after the clip showing her in the sitcom Cybill, that seemed a pretty awesome claim. Shrieking onset at Cybill Shepherd v being God – I guess it's six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Does anyone else on the planet talk about their jobs like this? Well, having spent eight years reporting on fashion, I can assure you they most certainly do. Designer Miuccia Prada, for example, said that her collection for Miu Miu next season was about "questioning innocence". This should be translated to the layman as: "I decided to do cat prints.""Hadley Freeman writes, "Last weekend, with my brow raised high, I attended the New... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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Spice Girls: The Musical

Geri Halliwell wants to make a musical about the rise to fame of the Spice Girls in... more

emmaboswood
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1 month ago
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1 comment

Hearing Man in Deaf Role Stirs Protests in New York

Artistic license has always been a part of adaptations on screen, stage and in print.... more

knews121
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1 month ago
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'Ten Years Later,' The Matthew Shepard Story Retold

"The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade — is based on the true story of Matthew Shepard, the young man who, in October 1998, was savagely beaten and left to die in Laramie, Wyo. Almost instantly, Shepard's name became a kind of grim rallying cry for those drawing attention to hate crimes committed against gays.

Now there's an epilogue to The Laramie Project, and tonight more than a hundred theaters around the country will perform readings of the new play. Together with the first one, it constitutes a powerful version of Matthew Shepard's story.

But it's not the only version — and that's a big part of why the epilogue exists.

Matthew Shepard's savage killing was used to strengthen the argument for hate-crimes legislation. But meanwhile, another version of his story was gathering steam.

Six years after the crime, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 set out to debunk the idea that Shepard was murdered because he was gay. Like The Laramie Project, the one-hour episode included interviews with Shepard's friends, as well as investigators assigned to the case. ABC's Elizabeth Vargas interviewed Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney and Russ Henderson, both serving life sentences.

Shepard, 20/20 reported, may have used methamphetamine. The report said that McKinney had been a dealer. "Meth is what made the world go around in Laramie," a friend of McKinney's and a former dealer told Vargas.

20/20 also reported that McKinney and Henderson had been on a meth binge in the days before meeting Shepard. And prosecutor Cal Rerucha told 20/20 that "the methamphetamine just fueled this point where there was no control. So, it was a horrible, horrible, horrible murder. But it was a murder that was driven by drugs."

Playwright Moises Kaufman believes the 20/20 story was "terrible journalism" that "changed the nature of the dialogue." So one of his goals with the new Laramie Project epilogue was to debunk the 20/20 story.

Kaufman and his Tectonic colleagues went back to Laramie last year, re-interviewing many of the people they'd met a decade ago — as well as talking to some new sources.

"One of the things we do in the play," says Kaufman, "is we go back and ask investigators ... and we go back over trial transcripts, and we prove that it was a hate crime."

The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later includes the comments of Rob Debree from the Albany County Sheriff's Office in Laramie.

"We've proven that there were no drugs on board with McKinney and Henderson — just none," Debree declares. And what about the claim that Shepard's murder was a robbery and drug deal gone bad? "That's some kind of massive denial," one openly gay Laramie resident tells Tectonic Theater.

Laramie police commander Dave O'Malley, who also appears in the 20/20 episode, says: "It angered me more than anything the things [ABC] didn't say — the things they left out."""The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade — is... more

St_Alia_10191
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1 month ago
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Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim

"The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.

Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.

The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.

He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.

Sir Brian said: “There might be ten to 20 common phrases between two plays by different authors. The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar. But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different.”

The Shakespeare matches came from four scenes, about 40 per cent of the play. The remaining scenes had about 200 matches with works by Kyd, best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a play known to have influenced Shakespeare, indicating that he wrote the other 60 per cent of the play.

The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in Edward III has been debated for about 150 years but has found favour only recently. It was ignored by mainstream publications until 1997, when it was included in The Riverside Shakespeare, and has subsequently been accepted by The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

Sir Brian said: “When you have 200 [matches] you can be pretty sure. Everyone can see that certain scenes are very Shakespearean, but no one could see why there were verses that are definitely not his. There is a real difference in quality between the two authors.”

The mystery has endured because some academics refuse to believe that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights at that stage of his career, he said. “They think, Shakespeare has been elevated to the position of the Bard, so why would he have collaborated with anyone else?”""The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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4 comments

After six years, Baghdad's theatre opens its doors again

"The play, To enjoy the sweetness you must taste the bitterness, produced, written,... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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2 comments

Rupert Goold is wrong: Judi Dench is not 'strangling theatre'

"To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger actors ought to have a bit more respect for the traditions to which they belong, as Rupert Goold has done, is insulting, absurd and maybe even self-serving. The director is hugely gifted, but he’s surely guilty of Year Zero, clean-slate thinking.

For him, freshness is too often about imposing his own clever-clever ideas on plays, not in discerning and fulfilling an author’s aims and intentions. And that’s not a generational problem, as Goold must have discovered when members of his own cast rebelled against his reinterpretation of King Lear, with the result that it was a bit more Shakespearean when it moved from Liverpool to London.

On the other hand, he’s right to defend younger actors from any inference that they’re less able than their predecessors. He’s equally right to add that they’re more physically adroit than, say, many members of the Gielgud generation. One can only judge the quality of actors from their performances on stage and my own recent experiences tell me that the future of acting and therefore of the British theatre is very bright indeed. Just last month I went to the little Bush Theatre in West London to see a play called 2nd May 1997, was delighted by a mainly young cast, and thrilled by a total unknown, a recent RADA graduate called Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

She played the unlikely pick-up of an earnest Lib Dem on election night — and suggested vulnerability, need, damage, even desperation, behind a tipsy, flirtatious and immaculately observed exterior. Would her and others’ performances have been better if they’d immersed themselves in theatrical history or watched their seniors from the wings, as Dame Judi did? In this case, probably not. In the case of major classical actors performing major classical plays, well, maybe.

Vanessa Redgrave is said to be able to walk on stage from the wings and, without obvious preparation or missing a beat, to transform herself into whatever character she is playing. American Method actors such as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino will spend hours thinking, feeling, willing themselves into a role. Dame Judi herself tries to have a quiet, reflective time, girding herself for the fray in her dressing room and, when she’s not on stage, turning on the Tannoy and listening to the unfolding production.

To watch Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi herself evolve their characters in rehearsal and then present the result on stage is obviously an education.

But each performer must find his or her own way to excellence. It’s not as if the pressure is missing. In a profession where unemployment often exceeds 90 per cent, performers who fail to exploit every opportunity for self-improvement — well, they would have to be foolish, self-destructive, mad.""To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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Edgy Theatre Edged Out By Audiences

"Art for art's sake, goes the saying. But the UK's radical theatres are increasingly... more

St_Alia_10191
added this
1 month ago
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0 comments

tagged w/ Theatre

Arthur Romeo

United Kingdom Talk Video Thursday 5th November 2009

'Brighton Beach Memoirs" Closes on B'Way after 1 Week

Breast cancer, second life theatre and musician mocking

The return of Carrie: The Musical

Scarlett Johansson To Star in "A View from the Bridge" Broadway Show

Microphones Create Controversy on Broadway (Seriously)

Culture Clash, 25 Years Out

Is this the future which I see before me?

Willem Dafoe = Strange?

Andrew Lloyd Webber diagnosed with Prostate Cancer

Drama group "Tarts" changes name after sexist complaints

The Trouble With Actor-Speak

Spice Girls: The Musical

Hearing Man in Deaf Role Stirs Protests in New York

'Ten Years Later,' The Matthew Shepard Story Retold

Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim

After six years, Baghdad's theatre opens its doors again

Rupert Goold is wrong: Judi Dench is not 'strangling theatre'

Edgy Theatre Edged Out By Audiences

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