We really don't care about theatre do we?

i'd like to go to the theatre in the next couple of weeks, and i want to see something hard-going and bleak, for about a tenner (don't care if i get a shitty seat). in london. any suggestions?
-- emsk ( emsk), Saturday, 18 February 2006 12:32

West Ham v Everton?
-- Alba (Alba), Saturday, 18 February 2006 12:41

--

Bravo!!

LAT Review

I really dislike musicals on the whole, but my aunt wants to take me to that and I'm tempted to see it because it has so many great songs.

Haha, going to a musical about sailors with my aunt. So gay.

i wish i had been at south pacific tonight instead of mamma mia (with visiting in-law who sprung for the tickets).

sting for nolte!!

Brantley swoons

wtf w/ gypsy getting all those raves????

also i saw sunday in the park last weekend... the george was good, probably like him better than mandy, but i just feel like the play itself is problematic... the pretty music and awesome design were not enough to compensate for the fact that the show takes soooo long to go anywhere.

New Yorker
WaPo
Seattle P-I

i saw crooked at the women's project tonight. it was goooood!

saw one of the greatest shows of my life last night at the tramway in glasgow - Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's "Myth". he's one of the main people in the company Ballet C de la B. 20 performers acted out an incredibly intense dance piece based around manga and character based multi level computer games. it really was a stunning and profound experience.

http://www.resmusica.com/images/paris_myth_cherkaoui.jpg

http://files.fluctuat.net/images/m/y/myth-600.jpg

i'm going to see Ann Liv Young's sexually explicit take on "Snow White" tonight. pray i get out in one piece.

http://www.cassero.it/files/gb07/ann_liv_young.jpg

incredible interview with her here:

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/dance/2108/pure-as-the-driven-snow

In her streamlined new show, Snow White, Young dances, has sex with a dildo, screams her head off and sings along to music by Styx, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige and Pat Benatar.
...
In Paris, Emily hit me in the face with a sword, really hard, by accident. I played with that; I said something like, “You just hit me in the face. You fucking bitch.” It hurt, but it was also no big deal and she was just mortified and some of the people in the audience really felt for her. In Amsterdam, the dildo fell off during the middle of the show and it’s a vital part of the show—it has to be on her—so I said, “Michael get your ass over there and tape it!” The audience lost it. It’s funny to see what people think is funny. They like it when people are humiliated.

Oh how I hope that show goes on tour.

the Ann Liv Young show? where are you, Eazy?

I'm in Chicago.

New thread idea: 'We don't really care about a nude woman playing Snow White, dancing, having sex with a dildo, screaming her head off and singing along to music by Styx, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige and Pat Benatar, do we?'

I am very excited to be going to see Myth tonight, on jed's exhortation!!

Eazy, make the thread.

czn, you will love it. there were only about 80-100 audience members for the show last night & i'm making it my personal mission to get the numbers up for the rest of the run, including going to see it for a second time on saturday.

: D

for Myth:

we really don't care about new york drag queens, 10 foot tall ladies in crinolines, haunted libraries, lovers with downs syndrome, and Japanese stick fighting, do we?

immense

like a psychodrama by tati

damien jalet is hawt:
http://www.aomori-museum.jp/event/dance/japanese/competition/photo_05.jpg

‘In Foi I worked on the theme of angels and people. Now I am looking at the reverse
side: not devils, but shadows. I am interested by the notion of light and shadow. The way I can
manipulate shadows with dancers, so that the shadow ‘does something back’ to reality.
Normally it is the object that creates the shadow, not the other way round. But it is precisely
this reverse thinking that interests me. I want to see whether I can work back to front: what
would happen if the shadow drove me forwards, instead of me creating it? What if that were the
reality? If our reality were actually the mirror-image of the shadow, which in its turn is the real
‘I’? It is an interesting way of thinking, because you change your perspective. You no longer
approach reality on the basis of the limits of what you consider to be reality, but actually take
up an unconventional position. You view things at a different level. You turn the picture over.
The sense of shadow led me to ‘gothic’ people, and to the source of them – Gothic – as well as
to the links between Gothic and depression and melancholy, then ending up at ‘trauma’ again.’

- http://www.fransbrood.com/picts/resource/DOS_Larbi2007_EN.pdf

Tony nominations out -- August: Osage County and STEW! did really well as expected; meant to see Passing Strange by now...

http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=46495&cat=2

yeah, i meant to get stew tix before the announcement

Good noms for A:OC -- those were probably the strongest performances in the cast.

is it out of the question for R'n'R or Rufus to win?

Stoppard has about as good a shot for Play as Hillary for prez

who was Rondi Reed in A:OC?

She's a Steppenwolf company member, was one of the sisters married to the guy in Florida, or divorced, or something like that - I don't remember.

If any of you-all happen to be in Chicago between this weekend and June 15, a short play I wrote and directed is running as part of Sketchbook at the Steppenwolf Garage. Also has premieres of new plays by some good playwrights (Itmar Moses, Jose Rivera, Sean Graney, etc.), and some really good actors and directors involved in this thing.

Stoppard has about as good a shot for Play as Hillary for prez

heartfelt emotion tears

I notice Mamet didn't get a play nod for November. Sounds like it was pretty light satire.

As long as I'm self-promoting, a different short play of mine is going to be staged at some kind of Bushwick arts festival at the beginning of June.

was one of the sisters married to the guy in Florida, or divorced, or something like that - I don't remember.

She was Mattie Fae, the aunt -- Violet's sister, Little Charles's mom.

South Pacific, then. Kelli O'Hara, my expectations of whom had originally been low but were raised slightly, was a bit of a letdown. Perfectly good singer, sure, and indubitably more tasteful than Reba McEntire, say, and maybe Mary Martin is a you-can't-go-back-again kind of deal, but she wasn't quite Mitzi Gaynor-in-memory either, and singing wasn't the only issue - I was kinda missing the chemistry that Brantley saw. She did get better/more affecting as the show went along, which I guess is part of the character arc, but seemed kinda tired? Again, no one can be Pinza, but Szot was excellent as expected, with the same relationship caveats. Lowering the romantic temperature highlights the more thoughtful themes, of course, which was probably by design. The surprise was Morrison. I expected him to fall slightly lower than average on the taste scale, maybe making too much of the Timberlake resemblance, but he was more than adequate on both singing and acting fronts. My real stars, though, were the supporting players - Danny Burstein demurely showstealing as Luther Billis and Loretta Ables Sayre wonderful as Bloody Mary, plus the Sea-bees and Li Jun Li as Liat. The production varies between simple but correct and simple but mildly :o. Overall perhaps not worth the hosannas, but I'd still jump at a chance to go again.

I almost had to jump into the Billis part in hS.

who's going to the Polish outdoor Macbeth in Brooklyn?

i should say o'hara's honey bun was fantastic. that's more her speed, plus it had burstein.

Chicago takin over dem Tonys

play
direction
acting
acting
set design too
boo-yah

What kind of drugs make Patti LuPone screech like that? Such a narcissistic horror.

Deanna Dunagan's speech was super, but I thought Ben Brantley nailed Osage's weakness (and I liked it) in yesterday's NYT Week in Review, right down to the Carol Burnett vibe:

Yet even as its squabbling kinfolk take turns vivisecting one another in red-hot blue language, it becomes clear that “August” is also built for comfort. There’s not a confrontation or revelation in it that hasn’t been prefigured by dramas of five and six decades ago: by William Inge, in particular, but also Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and the Edward Albee of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Audiences whose frame of reference is fixed in television are more likely to see parallels with the sitcom “Mama’s Family,” in which a chronically discontented mother keeps trying to top herself in insulting her grown-up progeny. Acted with undeniable verve by a big ensemble (itself a rarity in Broadway dramas these days), this Steppenwolf production allows theatergoers to feel they’ve experienced a Significant Play without being in any way challenged.

Well, after having a character fellate a chicken drumstick in Killer Joe, Letts wrote a Broadway play instead of an off-Broadway one.

I mean I saw 'Equus' that one time it was showing here and I wanted to care there were horses and great lighting and nudity and EVERYTHING but then after a while I just snuck out and drank some booze in the bar. I like my theatre to be reeeeeeaaaallly groundbreaking and 'controversial' or at least ridiculously musical and over the top otherwise I just don't want to pay that kind of money to sit on my arse and watch people 'have feelings'.

Subversiveness is overrated.

I'm pretty Quaker in my theater tastes. Gimme a 30-seat theater and the alchemy of turning something ordinary into something extraordinary. And use lamps instead of stage lighting if possible.

Having a sledgehammer-obvious Native American character in the attic is overrated.

Oh sure, I'd agree with that. But what are some better American plays written since 1995?

And I don't know if she's overrated as much as overlooked -- I haven't read reviews praising her symbolic role in the play. Though I would say that it adds to the scale of the play having someone outside of the family and the sheriff in the script.

Actually I do like quite naturalistic stuff with really subversive undertones. I'm not asking for people rolling around nekkid in peanut butter and jelly with flashing lights (lights, lights,lights..) screaming out 'APPLE' or nothing, I just want something a little more original.

But what are some better American plays written since 1995?

If i could afford to go I'd know, maybe.

I'm with you there. That's why I go to museums when I go to NYC.

OK, who's got an extra Polish Macbeth ticket? (I probably shdn't go anyway...)

http://www.broadway.com/Gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=569220

In the heights: tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7 - I have an extra free ticket if anyone wants it!