We really don't care about theatre do we?

good theatre is great. people who think theatre is obsolete know nothing.

In addition Lepage/ Ex Machina were frequent visitors to Glasgow and i think i have seen most oof his plays here. Theatre de Complicite don't come here anymore either. I miss stuff like this.

Of course, this is only true if you disregard the technical differences between onstage performance, film and television. As far as I am concerned the differences really are minor technicalities.

In all three media you have scripted dialogue telling a story with actors, costumes, scenery, lighting, incidental music, and so on.

The fact that a camera lens imposes a control over the audience's point-of-view that cannot be utilized in stage performances does not make much difference in my view. Stage direction tries to filter the audience's attention, too, except it uses lighting effects, blocking of actor's movements, and other technical means that are somewhat less effective than a camera. The goal is quite similar.

Theater people are just blinded by their nostalgic love of certain techniques that must be modified or discarded in a filmed setting as opposed to a stage setting. They identify these technicalities with 'theater', abhor the new technicalities of movies and tv, and overlook the overwhelming similarities between all the various forms of the modern theater.

you're making like montage is just another nifty gadget in the film director's toolbox; really it is ESSENTIAL to film, much more so than lighting and blocking is to theatre

xpost

the spatial quality of film and theater are to a large extent opposed.... the camera's "field of vision" is like an upside-down triangle, whereas a conventional stage is a bit the opposite (why it's rare for a theater director to stage a signification action in the back of the stage--harder to ensure that the audience's attention is directed to it). so they pose very different staging problems. i don't quite buy aimless's argument that this means they are different only in the method by which an audience's attention is directed. i think there is a place for ontological speculation....

slocki, it seems to me a hell of a lot of great films were made in the 1930s, and many of them were only a few baby steps away from being filmed stage productions with over-the-shoulder reaction shots and the occassional montage (thank you Sergei) to spice them up.

If montage is as ESSENTIAL as you say it is, then these films would have failed at birth, rather than becoming successful films - which, not coincidentally are still watched, enjoyed and studied today. Montage is just another nifty tool in a director's toolbox. It just happens to be such a useful tool that it gets used a lot.

30s films are usually edited pretty briskly, so it's not simply a matter of using up a reel of film shooting an integral theatrical performance. "montage" doesn't mean soviet montage necessarily--just, y'know, editing bits of film together. all hollywood films are edited together from master shots, medium shots (plan american etc.), and occasionally inserts/close ups at a rate of i dunno one shot every 10-12 seconds. (nowadays it's more like every 5 seconds but we're talking about the 1930s)

i think this is pretty important: "filmed theater" isn't really as simple as that, the fact of it being filmed and edited together in the conventional way transforms the way the story is being told. perhaps the "meaning" is ultimately the same, but i'm not sure that's true or if it even matters so much.

to get "filmed theater" you need to go back to 1895-1910 or so, like the original version of the "wizard of oz" which is basically "selected scenes from the stage play of 'the wizard of oz'"--but as i noted above the spatial aspect of film is such that a stage performance is NECESSARILY transformed if it is to be "faithfully" captured on film. those early films that don't bother with such a transformation are often incomprehensible and usually dismissed as "primtive" (that's another hill of beans or whatever).

some "fixed setup" films do sort of selfconsciously evoke a "theatrical" quality, or even overtly beg comparison to theater: oliveira, etc.--or to "primitive" cinema (angelopoulos). and certain kinds of framing (even outside the context of a long-take style) can evoke theater, "performance" too with fruitful results. but lots of fixed-setup films really don't evoke theater at all. it's impossible to imagine hou or jia films as anything but cinema--the natural settings, natural lighting, etc. are absolutely critical.

anyway yeah so i think cinema can do a lot with "theatricality" and i don't think calling a film "theatrical" is a very convincing slur (unless you're writing in 1905, maybe).

i'm repeating myself and possibly not making sense.\

XPOST

s1ocki, i didn't find aimless's post dismissive. anyways i'm not a film student or anything. i'm not sure about agree/disagree--i don't think i dismissed aimless's post or embraced it fully. i just sort of responded to it.

!!

Seen anything else? New Yorkers, Albee's Seascape?

that's probably it, coupled with the world's general philistinism. I wuv the theatre and wish i went to it more often. The last thing I saw was a monster production of Titus Andronicus before Christmas.

We ran the show and 40% of the cast is bad on lines less than 2 weeks prior to open.

The lead basically asked instead of working scenes that sucked, we could do a fast line through and go get chicken wings.

Community theater mang

20 minutes after we were given a 5 minute break, my scene partners are in another room playing with cats.

Community theater mang.

almost two weeks to go, no problem! just needs to be right for the first dress imo

My personal Hell is being in theater productions forever with scene partners who can't get their lines out.

Currently living this hell right now in rehearsals. All my concentration gets broken while I have to listen intently for something that sounds like my cue line because the cue never comes as written.

This shit is the worst. I did a play before with this one guy who not only was constantly forgetting lines, but would improvise and adlib, thinking because it was a comedy this was hilarious.

It was a sort of rapid fire farce and acting with him was fucking terrifying as a result. I hated him by the end.

20 minutes after we were given a 5 minute break, my scene partners are in another room playing with cats.

Community theater mang.

I want to hear more about these theater cats

I've stumbled onto these nice, considered theatre reviews from a London writer named Tom Bolton

https://tombolton.co.uk/category/theatre-blog/

But are there cats

Xxpost lol so my friend owns a cat Cafe and he is the director. We rehearse at it.

It results, predictably, in divided attention. Except with me because I'm a dog person

That's cool Tracer, you never see anyone write about this stuff.

Last time I was served something up it was a youtube podcast on the current Fry production of Importance Of Being Earnest that turned out to be the same AI someone used to sum up an ILX thread.

Yeah that's a nice blog, shared it with my daughter

show opened. went pretty well after looking for weeks like we were going to fall apart, technical goofery aside (spotlights not showing up, projector being so low that people's heads blocked content on it, etc).

got reviewed and mostly panned in the local paper. in the usual awkward fashion, I got the only positive callout in the review, which has little to do with my performance and more to do with the critic only being fond of my character (almost all of his criticisms were the script). so of course, the review is what everybody's yapping about this morning, everyone upset. i don't entirely get it, I've been on the opposite side of the coin, being the only person called out for sucking in an otherwise positive review - and several times, I agreed with the negative comments on my performance (the others, I just moved on and kept doing what I was doing). validation isn't why you do theatre. but we're needy folk.

also had a major panic attack after the show ended. my OCD/paranoia is bad and I was already in a bad place pre-show due to doomscrolling but also overdoing it trying to get myself into the right headspace for the subject matter. was already teetering when swore I heard people laughing at me in the audience during my last monologue, and 'being laughed at' is a major trigger for me. 98% sure my brain invented it.

anyway, theater! it was still fun and I'm glad to have the opportunity.

validation isn't why you do theatre.

it absolutely is lol

and in that spirit WELL DONE. how long is the run?

two performances, so we're half done! lol....this was kind of an experimental piece so I think that works perfectly. I'd like to see this remounted in a few years taking the learnings we got from this one.

Surprising connection between the most produced playwright in the country and Epstein. (Not Mamet, L. Gunderson.)

dlh, i enjoyed your update immensely! please keep us updated

How was yr 2025 in small-town theatre, dlh?

aw nice to read. first of all congratulations to neanderthal, congratulations to tracer, and god bless etc's mother-in-law.

march: showed the CAESAR cast CAESAR, a year later, in the same movie theater it had been staged in. the script for this complicated show, even when at its internal film department's request i color-coded every word of stage direction according to whether it was live or video or live-video, was infamously incomprehensible to everyone on the project except for me and the stage manager, and the cast of course couldn't see it when it ran (except for what you got to watch when you were a pleb hiding in the audience waiting to yell something), but all their friends saw it and told them about it and they were excited to see it and it was nice to show it to them.

april: co-directing and lighting design, HADESTOWN (TEEN EDITION). total adventure tbh, like a movie about teaching. the kids worked so hard. we lived in the theater (a ramshackle 100-year-old public high school auditorium: bad acoustics, but good equipment), slept in the theater, ordered pizzas. explained to the kids about the elusynian mysteries. tried to impress a sense of historical obligation. pumped in a lot of fog. told them they could have a "school play" or they could have strangers coming up to them crying unable even to explain what had been done to them and which one did they want. stomped around at spring-sunday hawaiian matinees like WHY ARE THE DOORS OPEN mr difficult listening hour the audience is drenched in sweat WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IN HELL. the lights came up every night on seas of weeping parents. stricken dads groaning in the dark when orpheus turned around. (myself i'd begin crying on the same line every night, which was also reliably the show's biggest laugh: "oh-- it's about me.") closing night persephone broke down herself from end-of-show heartbreak halfway thru "we raise our cups" (staged as character-shedding "troupe" number, with midstage curtain closed and set vanished, so fine by me) and had to physically lean on her bestie eurydice to get thru it; a month later they graduated.

april, concurrently: lighting design, THE LITTLE MERMAID JR. idk if you're familiar with this show. ursula and triton are siblings and ursula has a mile-a-minute expository song detailing how she was passed over for the succession because of sexism. but everything else is almost exactly the same, tho in a departure from the movie the curtain line is no longer literally "i love you, daddy". i told the hadestown kids, who were running opposite it for a weekend and down in the mouth about tickets, that it was "garbage for babies", but of course the mermaid kids worked like crazy too and ariel in particular was living a dream and living up to it. (i was also proud of the chef.) i busied myself trying to approximate the gorgeouser movie moments-- sinking down shaft of light on final chorus of part of your world, prince eric surfacing from near-death experience to ariel's face eclipsing the sunset, etc.-- and on making almost all of the lights shimmer almost all of the time. probably nauseating, but that's the ocean for you.

july: directing THE WINTER'S TALE, set in 1972 and 1988. (ad copy: WHAT IS THE WINTER'S TALE? IT'S... and then a long list of mutually contradictory concepts.) the idea here was that the first (tragic) half is all monochrome high-toned domestic drama and the second (comic) half is tasteless popcult vomit featuring karaoke, boomboxes, characters dressed as darth vader and captain hook, and eventually a slow-build full-cast song-and-dance number to "should i stay or should i go", with the broken-spanish backing vocals translated into broken czech. ("i thought i was hallucinating," said three weekends of audiences' single czechophone.) the two halves are separated by The Bear Scene, which worked like this: the bear (me in a really unpleasant suit, but credited as "itself") approaches from the extreme distance, across the park, shambling towards the set thru the background of several minutes of scene while audience members point and whisper (and their dogs go berserk with vigilance); when it attacks antigonus he runs terrified thru the little curtain that has served as a backdrop for the heretofore strictly contained and stagebound action; the bear rears up and simply rips the curtain down (magnets), revealing a screaming antigonus and an entire backstage tentful of shocked out-of-character actors (scrolling phones, looking at scripts etc) who scatter in every direction as the bear chases antigonus thru the audience and into a nearby building from which treadwellesque sounds emerge thruout the following shepherd/clown dialogue. intermission. second half (your favorite), with its bizarre tonal shift, dance number, and celebrated Statue Scene, plays on the now-destroyed set, which the cast eventually rebuilds in front of you (magnets) just in time for the climactic return to sicily. now originally the plan here was to have "guest bears"-- to bring scene luminaries and old friends in to don the bear suit one night at a time-- but the bear run turned out to be such a white-knuckle affair (a few hundred yards of uneven, rootgnarled ground, in the dark, probably in the rain, wearing the world's blindest costume) that for two weeks i was afraid to hand it over to anyone. when my oldest friend (an oahu theater scene vet) visited for closing weekend, eager to be Guest Bear, a cascading series of medical and emotional emergencies meant that he instead had to stand in for polixenes (the king of bohemia) opposite my own standing-in for his own oldest friend leontes (king of sicily), while the guy playing prince florizel stepped up as the bear (and immediately did it better than i ever had: marvelous snuffling). a shambolic shoestring show but festive, and fun to watch disorient its audiences. suspect this of being Major Shakespeare. leontes' spider speech ("there may be in the cup a spider steeped / and one may drink, depart, and yet partake no venom / because his knowledge is not infected / ...i have drunk, and SEEN the spider") is just great. grateful i got to give it that last day. it was a matinee and some of the hadestown kids were there. i did my best, script in hand.

august?: think i was in a reading of TRUE WEST around this time, as the hollywood agent.

september: playing guildenstern in ...ARE DEAD (rip). i have kind of a freak facility for learning lines and never have to try very hard (at remembering the lines-- at the acting i am always trying and always failing) but uh i did have to try pretty hard here. hard stuff. actress playing rosencrantz was ophelia opposite my hamlet several years ago so that was a nice trippy reunion; we just hung out and drilled and drilled and drilled. a fun play to do for audiences who are feeling it. (we had both kinds.) i don't love it much myself tbh. "what if waiting for godot but you have to remember the details of hamlet" is not a pitch aimed anywhere but exactly at me, but it's also not one i much get the point of. you sure get a great exit tho, as guildenstern. i kept wearing a kirby tshirt to rehearsals so the girl playing ophelia gave me a little pink pin of kirby in fierce fighting pose, which i now superstitiously wear like a flag pin while doing any theater work, as symbol of strength thru mutability.

october: lighting ROCKY HORROR again, because a theater company that's not doing rocky horror regularly is just leaving money on the table. (we do it every two years. the other years a company on the other side of the island does it.) this is my third time lighting rocky horror and i can't exactly say i refreshed the springs of my art. (fave bit to light, every time: riff raff firing beams of pure antimatter at bellowing rocky cradling frank's body-- thus posthumously achieving his fay wray dreams-- as all light gradually drains to blood-red interrupted by lurid green blasts of antimatter.) there tends to be a younger queerer cohort in these shows whom it's nice to see have the experience and they always grow thru it. but the real interest for me was that this was the first full production in our New Space after many years in the (sometimes literal: see tempest notes upthread) wilderness. so it was my least adventurous rocky-lighting gig (the first one was on a giant parking-lot stage, during covid-- and also i played eddie, and i came in on a real motorcycle, from way at the back of the parking lot, a triumph motorcycle actually, with a wireless mic strapped to the engine, gradually turned up at the soundboard until the bike drowned out everything that was happening, which, if you are unfamiliar with the show, is that the LEAD is SINGING A SONG and you just FLATLY INTERRUPT HIM by RIDING UP ON YOUR AMPLIFIED TRIUMPH MOTORCYCLE while the ENTIRE CAST AND AUDIENCE SCREAMS YOUR CHARACTER NAME, and then you sing ONE SONG, are IMMEDIATELY CHAINSAWED TO DEATH, and provided you are not returning as dr. scott are then DONE FOR THE NIGHT: what a GREAT part-- meanwhile various logistical and technical constraints back then meant i had to light the show blind, in longhand, on graph paper, in my bedroom, then program it into the board as night fell and cross whatever fingers i hadn't already crossed against falling off the bike, so that's kind of a difficult experience to live up to) but in other ways this year was a big step, since this year's the first time i've lit anything in a permanent space i rigged myself. now lighting weekly thursday-night drag shows in this space; it's nice because the queens' expectations tend to have been set by handheld spotlights in bars and they relish the full theatrical setup.

december: directing A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM back at the high school (companion concept to winter's-tale-in-july). mostly let the students take the reins on this and they chose a fairly trad direction so it did not have any of my tasteless Concepts: probably for the best. but what it did have is a real abundance of fairies, since post-hadestown the program has swollen far beyond last year's numbers. we gave half of titania's lines away to her fairies, then created a whole matching crew of fairies for oberon and gave half his lines to them. pains me a little because while titania+oberon's lines are in textbook iambic-p, the lesser fairies in the original text talk in the same trochaic verse used to such effect by the witches in macbeth: it's shakespeare's creepy-nursery-rhyme idea of old magic. our version had peaseblossom and cobweb talking half the time in titania's regal blankverse. that's okay tho: kids should have lines. our nerdiest senior was dramaturge and helped prepare the text so we worried over all this stuff together; that was a nice interest to share.

upcoming: king midas in a staged reading of METAMORPHOSES (february); lighting design and geoffrey the sociopathic middle kid for THE LION IN WINTER (march); assistant lighting design for IN THE HEIGHTS (also march); codirecting COME FROM AWAY the frank capra 9/11 musical (april); repeatedly promising to audition for THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND (also april). not pitching a shakespeare in the park this summer. still trying to make macbeth happen.

I've had shows canceled due to a variety of reasons. The one I'm in now is about to go under because my friend hired an unhinged egomaniac who repeatedly said her reason for wanting the position is "proving to everyone she can do this" (with little to no regard for the product itself) who has managed to start a fight with a lead who is ready to quit...before we'd held a single rehearsal.

Sometimes I'm amazed productions ever see the light of day! Sadly this isn't even in the Top 3 of bizarre reasons I've had a show canceled

The position being *producer* even though their idea for fundraising production costs amounted to starting a GoFundMe for the play

Oof. Were you in rehearsals yet?

Nope.

It's officially pulled tonight. Producer said something borderline abusive to my friend who abruptly quit.

I'm not even mad. Feel like I dodged a bullet. My friend can't fire her because the producer is the one who entered the show in the festival- but playwright does have right to pull show itself which he's done so producer can't recast

To my OTHER friend that is

Thanks for the update, dlh!

Only just discovered the existence of Teen Hadestown as there's a local production in July - are there many other musicals where there's no "grown-up" licensing available? Loved the original Anais Mitchell album back in the day so have been very slow to come to grips with the metamorphosis it undertook on the way to Broadway, though her book Working On A Song was a fascinating read about process.

Saw the local production of A New Brain last weekend - illness in the cast meant the director stepped in as The Doctor, the choreographer as Nancy D, and the person playing the Minister played Roger as well (jacket on = former / off = latter), but if I hadn't known I wouldn't have been able to tell. Puppets as the two nurses! I'd seen the actor playing Mr Bungee in Assassins as Sam Byck, going to keep an eye on what else he turns up in.

Caught a Shakespeare-in-the-park performance of Much Ado About Nothing on the shore of Lake Pupuke (famous to any NZ 80s teen via Under The Mountain) - very very loose "underground punk club" setting/costuming but I guess wardrobe had fun, and the ducks/swans drowning out the dialogue at sunset.

So more about the drama upthread. The show did not actually get pulled. My friend, who wrote the script, had put up the expensive entrance fee that was nonrefundable (because the producer had no money, which...what?). So he wanted to recoup his costs because he's not a rich man and we blessed him givkng permission to the awful toxic producer to recast because it was completely understandable.

In 30 years of theater, this was only the second play I quit. The first was due to an unforseen work conflict. So it's been hard seeing not only the producer suffer no repercussions, but seeing other people do our show that we were handpicked to perform.

However, because I am a vindictive fuck, I read the local paper's review of the show and it got eviscerated. Yay schadenfreude. My friend will still recoup his costs but there is zero chance this shit will win any festival awards with one of the two local paper's hating it (since their critics choose the awards).