tagged w/ Theatre
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Buddy Holly songs: "That'll Be The Day" and "Every Day" - staring Zachary Stevenson as Buddy with Sun Theatre Critic Peter Birnie. Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story runs May 13–July 11, 2010 at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage.Buddy Holly songs: "That'll Be The Day" and "Every Day" -... more
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The Road to Broadway....this episode looks at preparations for the class of 2010 Showcase for casting agents in New York City. Go with the class to the Big Apple and see how Broadway stars are made!
This documentary series follows the stories of the students and teachers of the acclaimed Baldwin-Wallace College Music Theatre Program led by Victoria Bussert. Produced by theater artist and documentarian Geoffrey Short (www.geoffreyshort.com), STAGES gives viewers unprecedented access to this exclusive program that draws the very best talent from around the country to this small private college in Berea, Ohio (just southwest of Cleveland). Graduates of this program often go on to careers on Broadway. Learn more about Baldwin-Wallace College at www.bw.edu. See other theater video documentary series from Geoff Short at www.youtube.com/CallBackCleveland.The Road to Broadway....this episode looks at preparations for the class of 2010... more
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A chat with Patrick Stewart, Patrick Stewart interview, Macbeth, Hamlet, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Allow me to begin the introduction to this interview with an unabashed boast: it is a testament to my burgeoning ability to separate my work as a journalist from my sideline as an unabashed fanboy that I was able to sit down with Patrick Stewart for an interview about his work for PBS’s “Great Performances” – first as Claudius in “Hamlet,” then as the title character in “Macbeth – and not fully acknowledge my love of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” until just as I was standing up to leave.
To some, this may seem like a waste of a perfectly good conversation. To me, it felt just right…which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise. I mean, I’ve got the complete-series set sitting on a shelf in my living room, and I watched every single episode of the show when it originally aired. Surely I’d earned the right to geek out for a bit…and, yet, it just seemed too easy to approach it head on, so I found an easy opportunity to discuss it tangentially in connection with his Shakespearean efforts, and I felt good about it. Beyond that…well, really, when else was I going to get the chance to ask the man about the time he hosted “Saturday Night Live”? That’s not geeking out. That’s just making the most of an opportunity.
I walked into the room just as he was in the midst of regaling his assistant with a tale that had come up during the previous interview. Upon its conclusion, I was introduced as having chatted with Sir Ian McKellen last year. At this, Sir Patrick…he’s been knighted now, you know…grinned widely, greeted me warmly, and we took the very short stroll over to our seats.
Continued--
http://www.bullz-eye.com/television/interviews/2010/patrick_stewart.htmA chat with Patrick Stewart, Patrick Stewart interview, Macbeth, Hamlet, Star Trek:... more
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There are cities that would be uncomfortable with the idea of a strip joint stuck like a squashed tomato in the middle of downtown, cities that would summon up a righteous case of outrage over a bawdy marquee offering titillation and temptation right next to the art museum, the hip tourist hot spot and one of the toniest hotels in town.
But these cities would not be Seattle.
Since the Lusty Lady announced it would be closing its doors in June after 27 years on 1st Street, a city that admittedly spent several years trying to shut the place down — or at least tame it into civility — has been practically in mourning.
"There's just something about the vibrancy of their presence that made it difficult for people to perceive them as a negative force in the community," said Phil Bevis, owner of Arundel Books down the street, who emphasized, as did many others, that he had never set foot inside the Lusty Lady. "What's that fancy French word I don't know how to pronounce? Insouciance. That's what they had."
The Lusty Lady's large, pink-and-black marquee has become one of the best-known features of the downtown Seattle landscape, luring customers with the fine art of the risque pun — turns of phrase that, more than being merely clever, often serve as a barometer of the city and the times.
"Skirt Locker," the Lusty Lady proclaimed after " The Hurt Locker" won this year's Oscar for best picture (earlier this month, again on a movie kick, it said, "Clash of the Tight Buns").
At Christmastime, the Lusty Lady celebrated "Jingle Balls," and for St. Patrick's Day it was "Erin Go Braugh-less." In honor of its neighbor the Seattle Art Museum and its famous "Hammering Man" statue, the Lusty Lady has come up with such tributes as "Hammer Away, Big Guy," and when the city was paralyzed by protests over the World Trade Organization in 1999, the Lusty proclaimed, "W-T-Ohhhh."
"There haven't been any problems of the kind one might typically associate with that kind of place, and maybe that's one of the reasons Seattle has such a fondness for it," said art museum spokeswoman Nicole Griffin. "They've got this great visual presence on one of the main streets of the city, and they have great humor about it. And you know, Seattle's a city of individual-ness, and I think people have appreciated that."
The Internet has been the main culprit in driving down business,....
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-lusty-lady-20100430,0,3626434.story?track=rssThere are cities that would be uncomfortable with the idea of a strip joint stuck like... more
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Barrier Island tackles the nature of a fearless community that chooses to stake their lives on the strength of the historic Galveston seawall -- built to protect the island from natural disasters -- as they await the arrival of one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States since Katrina, Hurricane Ike. Nominated for the 2009 Weissberger Award (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Barrier Island is the first play in “The Galveston Cycle.”
The production features Alex Bond* (Flamingo Court), David L. Carson* (Nixon’s Nixon), Anthony Crep, Mark Emerson*, Anne Clare Gibbons-Brown, Carol Hickey* (Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge; Original cast of Urinetown), Stu Richel* (Mortal Decisions: a diary of the Donner Party), Frankie Seratch and Jennifer Laine Williams*.
BARRIER ISLAND will play a 4-week limited engagement at Center Stage NY (48 West 21st Street, 4th Floor, Buzzer 401#). Performances begin Friday, April 30th through Saturday, May 22nd.
Visit http://www.MTWorks.org for more information.Barrier Island tackles the nature of a fearless community that chooses to stake their... more
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Postfeminism is that indicator that shows us the organism formerly known as feminism has grown into something far more complex than its liberal origins would lead us to expect. Cyberfeminism was born at a particular moment in time, 1992, simultaneously at three different points on the globe. Postfeminisms do not inhabit a network; they are the network of feminist discourse in virtual space and they are at their best when they are helping to forge communities of practice ...... http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/section-blog/273-from-cyborgs-to-hacktivists-postfeminist-disobedience-and-virtual-communitiesPostfeminism is that indicator that shows us the organism formerly known as feminism... more
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worrg
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2 years ago
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"AFTER four decades of playing almost every sort of sociopath imaginable, Christopher Walken laid down the law a couple of years ago with his agent about the scripts she kept sending him.
“Look, enough already,” Mr. Walken, who is 66, recalled telling her, as he spoke recently in a half-dark room near a Manhattan rehearsal space. “I want to play a nice guy with a wife and a family and a dog and a house. And she said, ‘We’ll look for that for you.’
“And then she sends me this new play to read, and I read it, and I call her up and say, ‘Wow, is this the guy with a house and a wife and a dog?’ And she said, ‘Read it again.’ And I did. And she was right.”
While the play’s title, “A Behanding in Spokane,” was a tip-off that this was no “Brady Bunch” redux, and while the story’s handcuffs and gun and explosives and grotesque surprises underscored that point, Mr. Walken concluded that it was fundamentally a story of “nice people.” Creepy, maybe; confrontational, certainly; at their wits’ end, to say the least.
But after playing troubled men for so long, from the films “Annie Hall” and “The Deer Hunter” in the 1970s to later stage roles like Iago in “Othello,” Mr. Walken has become a pro at finding a sunny side in the spookiest of souls.
“What struck me most about the play is it’s a good-natured piece, if you look past the rough language and subject and all that stuff I usually have to deal with,” said Mr. Walken, a New York theater veteran who is returning to Broadway for the first time in a decade with “Behanding,” which began preview performances last week at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. “Every character in this play, I like them. They’re outcasts. Struggling, but decent.”
“They’re not crazy, they’re just —— ” he said with a pause, “strange.”
The strange character for Mr. Walken this time around is Carmichael, a shy, remote man — much like the actor himself — who has been searching among corpse dealers for his left hand ever since it was hacked off 47 years earlier. The play unfolds in virtually real time over 90 minutes in a seedy hotel room, where Carmichael squares off against two con artists (played by Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan) and a nosy hotel clerk (Sam Rockwell).
The play reflects the dark humor of its author, Martin McDonagh (“The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” “The Pillowman”), whose sensibilities seem strikingly in sync with Mr. Walken’s.
“I do like to write sinister but quite funny guys, who can combine a sense of menace and danger but also real loss,” Mr. McDonagh said by phone. “Carmichael is all of that, but he’s also someone who is very, very honorable in his own crazy way, with a moral code that gets crossed by people. Chris is so ideal in this role, because he’s so funny but can turn to that dark side on a dime, and because he can see the niceness in these odd people.”
Beyond bringing Mr. Walken back to the stage — he was last seen in 2000 in a Tony-Award-nominated performance in the musical “James Joyce’s The Dead” — Carmichael also stands out as one of several strong-willed male characters on Broadway this spring, a year after a season of imperious female roles (“Mary Stuart,” “33 Variations,” “Irena’s Vow,” “Blithe Spirit”). The forthcoming plays “Enron” (with Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling as characters), “Next Fall,” “Fences” and “Red,” as well as the musicals “American Idiot,” “Million Dollar Quartet” and “La Cage aux Folles” all feature men of fire-tested mettle who are grappling with identity, obsession, failure and mortality.
There is no particular rhyme or reason to Broadway being busier for one sex or the other; rather, it’s all about commercially viable shows. Some of these plays were big hits in London, while some of the musicals are set to proven hit songs. And, of course, there are always the shows with star performers to help sell tickets, like Mr. Walken in “A Behanding in Spokane.”
While the script of “Behanding” calls for Carmichael to be in his mid to late 40s, Mr. McDonagh and the director, John Crowley (“A Steady Rain,” “The Pillowman”), said they had trouble finding actors that age who were suitable for or interested in the role, which is part of an ensemble, in this premiere production of the play."
Read more at the article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/theater/21walken.html?ex=1282712400&en=970b9c992e59e1c5&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=TH-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M138-ROS-0310-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click"AFTER four decades of playing almost every sort of sociopath imaginable,... more
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In this episode go to master classes with top industry professionals and get a look at a preview of one freshman's upcoming Broadway audition. Then MT students enjoy a little down time ice skating before it's back to rehearsal for the Spring musical "Chess".
This documentary series follows the stories of the students and teachers of the acclaimed Baldwin-Wallace College Music Theatre Program led by Victoria Bussert. Produced by theater artist and documentarian Geoffrey Short (www.geoffreyshort.com), STAGES gives viewers unprecedented access to this exclusive program that draws the very best talent from around the country to this small private college in Berea, Ohio (just southwest of Cleveland). Graduates of this program often go on to careers on Broadway. Learn more about Baldwin-Wallace College at www.bw.edu. See other theater video documentary series from Geoff Short at www.youtube.com/CallBackCleveland.In this episode go to master classes with top industry professionals and get a look at... more
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chandu
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2 years ago
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New York Neo-Futurists Desiree Burch, Cara Francis & Erica Livingston serve up a cure for what ails you in this Neo-Medicine show, performing in and around a giant pot of self-made soup. Bottling this soup, as well as a series of elixirs, potions, tonics and products, they heal and reveal the female experience live, honest and in the flesh.
Incorporating ingredients from interviews, living newspaper, personal stories, circus acts and freak shows, the women of The Soup Show ultimately feed their audiences with a question “How far has the women's movement moved us?” The fierce trio honor the 30th Anniversary of Women’s History Month, and show you why the readers of the Village Voice named The New York Neo-Futurists “The 2009 Best Performance Artists in New York.”
THE SOUP SHOW will be presented at HERE ARTS CENTER (145 Avenue of the Americas NY, NY 10013). Performances begin Thursday, March 4th and continue through Saturday, March 27th. Opening Night is Thursday, March 4th (at 7 P.M.).
Tickets are $18.00 ($12 Student rush with valid I.D.) Advance tickets can be purchased online at http://www.here.org/soupshow, or by calling 212-352-3101. Tickets may also be purchased at the theatre’s box office half hour before curtain.New York Neo-Futurists Desiree Burch, Cara Francis & Erica Livingston serve up a... more
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FoolishPeople present A Red Threatening Sky; an immersive Valentine’s event combining performance, art installation and investigative interaction to create Club Aethereus; a strange and surreal underworld of Gnostic Noir. A place where crime, passion, the sacred and profane all cast one shadow.FoolishPeople present A Red Threatening Sky; an immersive Valentine’s event... more
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"One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean authorship studies has just added a new candidate to the centuries-old debate about who else plausibly might have written the works we associate with the little-educated merchant and actor from Stratford-Upon-Avon.
The nominee is a complete shocker: Amelia Bassano Lanier, a converso (clandestine Jew) and the illegitimate daughter of an Italian-born, Elizabethan court musician.
Dozens of luminaries (Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain among them) over the years have joined the so-called anti-Stratfordian camp, convinced, as Henry James put it, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world.”
Until now, most of the proposed alternatives have been aristocrats such as William Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford – championed by the New York-based Oxford Society, publishers of the annual journal The Oxfordian.
“When you look at the plays without preconceptions of the author,” observes the journal's newly appointed editor, Michael Egan, “we'd have to say this is a highly educated person, well travelled, with intricate knowledge of the courts and aristocratic life. Where did an obscure provincial boy gain all this information?”
The Oxfordian's current issue profiles Stanley and de Vere along with another perennial choice, playwright Christopher Marlowe. But it's the addition of the female, Jewish contender – a pioneering woman poet – that will turn heads.
The principal proponent of this theory is 55-year-old John Hudson, a British Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady Players. In The Oxfordian, Mr. Hudson argues that if Bassano (Lanier was her married name) did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major collaborator.
Her name is not new to Shakespeare studies. In 1979, British historian A.L. Rowse suggested that Bassano, with her family's Mediterranean skin colouring, was the famous “dark lady of the sonnets,” Shakespeare's mistress. Ridiculed at the time, that view is now commonplace among scholars.
Mr. Hudson goes further: He maintains that Bassano wrote the sonnets about herself; as with the plays, Shakespeare was simply a front used to hide her identity...""One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean... more
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"'Violence is the ultimate laziness'
Yet only now is Brook finishing the play that was one of the drivers of that journey. Eleven and Twelve has been stewing away in his head for nearly 50 years. Played out on an almost bare, sand-strewn stage with a cast drawn from all corners of the earth, it is the essence of Brook: spare, deceptively simple, profound and magical, throwing open a trapdoor into a world where its audiences would never otherwise have tumbled. The work, which comes to London next month, is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right. He would have passed unnoticed outside west Africa had not one of his disciples, the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, bumped into Brook in the 1950s.
On one level, this story of a dispute between sufis (who seek oneness with God and nature) over whether a prayer should be said 11 or 12 times is an allegory on fundamentalism. It also works as a critique of divide-and-rule colonialism, with Mali's French rulers turning one group against another as demands for independence mount before the second world war. But perhaps it is most powerful as a parable on the sacrifice that tolerance demands, as Bokar is eventually ostracised by his own people.
"To be violent is the ultimate laziness," Brook says. "War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN – with its muddy compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English liberalism" – is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult choice of all, and it is one that Tierno makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay for it."""'Violence is the ultimate laziness'
Yet only now is Brook finishing... more
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"...Every so often critics like to denounce director-driven Shakespeare as belittling the Bard's genius. In an interview for the online magazine Big Think last month, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout groused about concept-driven Shakespeare, which he epitomised as on-stage jeeps and machine guns. Shakespeare doesn't have to be "transgressive", Teachout proclaimed. "It's actually now more common to see conceptual productions … [in] which Hamlet is played as a Nazi, or a homosexual."
Let's ignore, for the moment, how blithely Teachout glides from gays to brownshirts. There's a larger ideological agenda here: how much should the Bard reflect our times? Shakespeare wrote a great deal about war, soldiering and tyranny, not to mention gender inequality and racism. You can't avoid politics in his work – unless you try really hard. Teachout isn't bothered by modern-dress Shakespeare, per se; he just disapproves when you translate the militarism into stark modern terms. You suspect he'd be fine watching the English soak Agincourt's soil with French blood, but he'd rather you not allude to Iraq or Afghanistan.
I also wince at conceptual Shakespeare, but for another reason: most directorial concepts are far too timid. Shakespeare was a moderate, nonsectarian humanist? Nonsense. Why not assume that if the Bard were alive, he'd be a bug-eyed anarchist or an eco-terrorist (he did love nature imagery, after all). Shakespeare, that notorious mixer-up of comedy and tragedy, certainly wouldn't be churning out well-behaved divertissements for conservative critics...""...Every so often critics like to denounce director-driven Shakespeare as... more
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