We really don't care about theatre do we?

really good things seen recently: "John Moran and his neighbour Saori" at the aurora nova in edinburgh, Zero Visibility Corporation's "I have a secret to tell you (please) leave with me" at the tramway in glasgow - utterly incredible, probably the most moving dance piece i've ever seen. their web site is playing up and take you to the directories rather than to the site proper but you can watch a clip here, if your interested:

http://www.zerocorps.com/secret.inc.php

not so good things seen recently: The Wooster Group's new thing "La Didone". A mess.

Two of my last three theater experiences:

I saw Kevin Spacey and Colm Meaney in Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon For The Misbegotten." It was more enjoyable than the one Eugene O'Neill play I've ever read ("The Hairy Ape") and less pure social-realist than I expected. Kevin Spacey was good but odd - I got the sense that it was a pretty liberal interpretation of the character. First act had a bit too much aw shucks humor but the second act was great.

-- Hurting 2, Monday, 4 June 2007 01:48 (3 months ago) Link

I saw Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio. He was good but I realized I really don't like Eric Bogosian's writing much.

-- Hurting 2, Sunday, 10 June 2007 14:58 (3 months ago) Link

The third and last was the musical Spring Awakening which was horrendous

i am going to mee's iphigenia 2.0 on friday. also a bunch of other stuff i don't quite remember throughout the semester (note: hidden cost of school - they don't tell you there will be all these required plays to attend adding an extra $150 to your semester)

anyway this is my own fault for choosing a program based in a theater department, but it's actually making me... not care about theatre and wish i could take music history classes all day long!

I pretty much hate theater and most performances of any kind because I get profoundly embarrassed for the performers and it makes me uncomfortable.
Still, I will go to the upcoming Wooster Group's staging of Hamlet because I like Hamlet and the WG are always so interesting and multi-media embracing that it takes the pressure off me as an audience member to give my undivided attention to the people on the stage. Also, they don't even remotely suck so that takes the edge off a bit too.

oh they don't suck, they can be amazing but i think they've settled into a technique that's suffering diminishing returns. i think the only thing that they could do now is to actually forego all that multi media stuff. the last few things they have done have all been based on acting out scenes that are happening simultaneously on a plasma screen, the source usually being a b-movie. the first time i saw it, in "House/Lights" i thought it was incredible, this time round it was an unfocussed mess. the use of technology was overblown and i didn't really feel that they knew why they were even doing it; i certainly didn't. it didn't have any of the elegance or clarity of their earlier work and, importantly, it didn't even look good. this one's based around scenes from Richard Burton's version of Hamlet, i hope it's better.

Obviously Broadway (including the straight plays) is problematic on a lot of levels - way too expensive, caters primarily to tourist, sees itself as competing with movies or something and goes for spectacle and/or celebrity and/or brand recognition.

I think I enjoy theater the most when it's the least like film or tv - just a bare bones set with the kind of acting that radiates intensity into the audience.

jed_ i agree about La Didone! I saw it at the Royal Lycaeum in Edinburgh and thought it was like some cruelly accurate parody of what the Wooster Group does. I wondered if it was me who had changed, or them.

I pretty much hate theater and most performances of any kind because I get profoundly embarrassed for the performers and it makes me uncomfortable.

I feel this way about many things, most recently, songs with lyrics.

it's great to hear this re wooster group because i keep hearing them praised as the only group 'making a difference' or being 'innovative'. people want to believe. i think this criticism is healthy.

tracer, i saw i there too, i wonder if we were at the same performance?!

I get profoundly embarrassed for the performers

My thought would be that either the director didn't know what kind of performance the play required, or the actors weren't good enough to deliver. I've seen it go both ways. (It's almost never the playwright's fault, because inferior scripts rarely get as far as their first performance.)

When it's done right, no one gets embarassed.

also, tracer, i just wondered to what possible end the whole grand event had been mounted. i didn't think the two texts illuminated each other but even if they had overlapped more successfully what could it even mean? what was the point of putting them together?

(It's almost never the playwright's fault, because inferior scripts rarely get as far as their first performance.)

hi have you seen any recent labute???

Nope. Premieres of plays do have a larger chance of the script being crap. But I'm pretty sure that the crap should get weeded out quickly once an audience gets a good look at it. If this no longer applies, then the theater really has moved to the far margin. At least, it used to be that the self-absorbed dilettantes were up on the stage, not in the seats.

Theatre 503 in Battersea gets in consistently great shows. Last week I went there to see Man Across the Way, a one-act play about surveillance and revenge in Glasgow. Next week they start a play called "Sting for Nolte" about a guy whose girlfriend buys him tickets to see Sting, sending him into paroxysms of self-doubt about his relationship!!

jed_ I'm bummed out that I didn't realize you were there, too! I was doing a play called Class for two weeks. It wasn't a great play but we managed to keep people entertained. And most importantly, didn't lose money.

I think theatre has had a lot of catching up to do with television, and was caught for a long time trying to seaparate and distance itself from the techniques television (and film) brought to drama. Quick cuts and a willingness to be middle-brow among other things. But I think it has caught up now. I've seen a lot of fun, loosey-goosey plays recently.

Haha now I see I posted almost the exat same thing four years ago, except I didn't think theatre had caught up yet!

I saw a guy reciting Joseph Conrad's complete "Heart of Darkness" on saturday. Deadly stuff it was.

(It's almost never the playwright's fault, because inferior scripts rarely get as far as their first performance.)

This comment only makes sense if we're talking Broadway, where the financial stakes are so high. Most of the new plays I have the opportunity to see in Chicago are in small storefront theaters, and while I've been lucky to see mostly good productions, I'm sure there are plenty of badly written plays that are put on for the cast and crew's friends week after week.

lolol there are lots and lots of bad plays guys

If you're in Chicago and want to see something on par with the Wooster Group (without the budget, though), see Lucky Pierre's current show.

how come i've never posted on this thread? how odd...

the wooster group were the main reason i was going to go to embra this year, so i'm glad i didn't (kinda).

i saw some of the older forced ents shows (first night, dirty work and and on the thousandth night) over the summer that i'd missed in my HATE ALL THEATRE period (c. 95-03) and they still totally rock more than any other theatre group, even if last year's words and pictures was a bit disappointing...

the world in pictures was amazing, i thought. i totally agree that they are the ones pushing the boundaries at the moment.

hmmm, i thought it was a bit of a one-trick pony, like a sketch that had expanded to fill two hours (obviously if it had expanded to fill 12 hours i'd have been happier ;)), rather than a show on it's own...

I missed both the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma and the Elevator Repair Service this week. Oh well!

put on for the cast and crew's friends week after week.

It seems wrong to call that theater. It's just the dramatic equivalent of third graders writing poems that their mothers put up on the refrigerator.

i'm sure tracer was exaggerating. a large number of the, literally, thousands of fringe shows get very small audiences. it doesn't make them not-theatre though.

re. forced entertainment - i saw the revival of the sophie calle show in london recently and thought it was terribly boring. it didn't put me off them though.

Aimless says that as if most third graders aren't better than most published poets (or certainly better than anything that gets published in, say, the New Yorker).

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117974574.html?categoryid=15&cs=1

LOGIN?

Brits, should I go see Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll (or however he punctuates it)?

well, it doesn't matter for now as the stagehand strike has shuttered it...

not Cymbeline or Pygmalion

i find theatre incredibly offensive

although i should point out all ive seen are cats, les miserables and rozencrantz and guildenstern are dead.

well, that's offensive.

They were interviewing sad Irish tourists who'd come all the way to NY to see PHANTOM, and all I could think was Lucky for you, bugger off and get some actual culture while you're here, now.

"Phantom," my sole exposure to that variety of "theatre," was quite possibly the worst 2-3 hours of my life

how has the person who bought tix made it up to you?

Okay I just realized the other day that the Webber target that is in need of some serious, vicious bagging is STARLIGHT EXPRESS. It is about TRAIN PEOPLE. He wrote it for his GRANDKIDS, which is always an ill omen.

http://www.ramada.de/bildarchivdb/16025_1156921595.jpg

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/51868170.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=17A4AD9FDB9CF19390335F8FA9CA92A691656D5B1677BA2578A0E721FD50B7AE

http://www.nrw-tourismus.de/fileadmin/user_upload/images/starlight-express.jpg

I have to admit the poster is awesome, though:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/2/25/200px-StarlightLogo.jpg

Poppa, an old steam engine and past racing champion, tells Rusty the legend of the Starlight Express, a midnight train who helps engines in distress. The Starlight visits Rusty in a dream, telling him that true power comes from within. In the end, the underdog, Rusty, triumphs over the more powerful engines, winning the final race, Pearl's love and his self-confidence.

"A Lotta Locomotion" was changed on the US/UK tours to "A Whole Lotta Locomotion". There have also been three different raps:

* Hey, you! (1984-1991)
* Check it out, can you believe this? (1992-2001)
* It's race time! (2004 onward)

Six Starlight posts is sufficient for now...

thread title made true: no broadway strike discussion! at least i couldn't find a thread.

thoughts anyone?

hoping that it kills off The Miserables

did the other critics flip for the Broadway revival of The Homecoming like Brantley?

I think John Lahr did in this week's New Yorker, as proof that the play is the masterpiece he always thought it was.

I'm going to see the new (not sure if it actually is or not) David Mamet play tonight. (By which I obviously really mean that one with Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in it.) Is it going to be shit? I'm quite hard to please when it comes to the theatre.