We really don't care about theatre do we?

i saw sweat and it was fine. it was pretty predictable; not entirely sure why this rocks everyone's world... especially against Taylor Mac's 24 hours which definitely did.

I saw a few Peter Hall stagings on Broadway in the '80s. Amadeus still strikes me as a gimmicky thing, but it was engineered with maximum cunning, and Ian McKellen's ham was well situated in it. Vanessa Redgrave was really full of mystery and desperation in Orpheus Descending, though as some of the Hall obits have said her Italian/Dixie accent was alien in ways perhaps unintended.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29467703

any Britfolk see this Long Day's Journey that's coming to Brooklyn? Jeremy Irons-Lesley Manville sounds pretty good to me. Casting of the brothers is crucial, though.

https://www.bam.org/theater/2018/long-day-journey-into-night

also this... Lear and LDJiN make for quite a twin stampede of the soul if done well

https://www.bam.org/theater/2018/king-lear

May as well dive into both, 7-8 dark hours.

Saw my first Ivo van Hove show this fall — A View from the Bridge at The Goodman. Had no idea going in if it would be high concept and shallow in character, but I was enthralled. Zero props in the whole show.

yeah, caek and I saw the NY run.

Never seen Lear onstage, LDJ twice in the '80s (Robards/Dewhurst/Campbell Scott; Lemmon/Spacey/Peter Gallagher).

I don't know why a third of the stage of the National Theatre's production of Network starring Bryan Cranston was a fully functioning restaurant, but it was pretty amazing to watch the play from the stage while eating a five course meal. Amazing, and confusing, not quite being able to devote my full attention to either the play or the food. The play? That was fine. Staging was fantastic, Cranston was great. It wasn't the revelatory satire it may have been in the 70s; I was thinking it would have been trivial to update it to a contemporary setting, but then realised that would have entirely lost the plus ca change theme which for me was the dominant element.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/gallery/2018/jan/09/the-beauty-and-fascination-of-londons-theatres-in-pictures

really loved The Band's Visit with Tony Shaloub. a musical based on the 2007 Israeli film about an Egyptian band that mistakenly gets stuck in the wrong town (with a name similar to the one they're supposed to perform in) for 24 hours.

lots to like in a simple story more to do with themes and feelings. one of the more entrancing scores in recent memory too (kind of had the effect that Light in the Piazza had on me)

so I'm closing a production of Sondheim's Assassins right now, where I played Samuel Byck. It's been a very flawed, amateur production, one in which we had an abbreviated rehearsal schedule (10 rehearsals) due to a previous show being scrapped and this one being substituted last minute.

Here are some highlights from this troubled production (which, nonetheless, has been fun):

*Leon Czolgosz didn't say his own name correctly for two performances. The Balladeer sings it as "Jewgoz". Leon speaks and looks like Bob Ross.

*The production is filled with anachronisms, such as modern KFC buckets and beer cans for scenes from the 70s and a Lincoln scene featuring a newspaper with a picture of a car in it.

*They were supposed to build me a fake steering wheel to use in the second Byck "drunk driving" scene, which is customary, but didn't. so I had to mime a fake steering wheel.

*Giuseppe Zangara forgot all of his Italian last night, and just repeated the same line (something something "traverso te") over and over again for 5 minutes

*On opening night, after Booth asks why all redneck assassins have three names, Oswald is supposed to say his own name, but screwed up and said "John. W....(screams) AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

*Charlie Guiteau both stated on one night that he killed James Kennedy then introduced himself on another night as James Garfield.

*I drink actual Budweiser in the show, and forgot to tell the director we were out before this weekend, so I opted to pick it up myself, but accidentally bought bigger sized cans (16 ounces). wound up having 3 during the show as I was stressed out, and had a beer beforehand, so was semi-buzzed and fucked up the order of my last monologue.

*Balladeer, who admitted he was 'high as a kite' during last Friday's performance, was listening to music through headphones backstage, then made his entrance and did the entire scene with his headphones still on

*4 actors got in a loud, Noises Off style argument at the backstage curtain yesterday, heard by everybody in the audience.

good stuff

VERY Noises Off!

did the gunshots cause any audience 'accidents'?

Nah cos both prop guns busted tech week, director just replaced it with a sound effect

The Tightrope, a documentary about Peter Brook’s rehearsal process, is on Amazon Prime and really compelling (after the first minute of clowning in the opening credits).

Thanks for that; just saw the prisoner and have always been a fan so this is a good end of year tonic.

this was fucking great, transgressive as hell and highly recommended:
https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/plays/strange-loop/

Also particularly good of late: Ain't No Mo, Mrs. Murray's Menagerie, Hillary and Clinton

Went to one of the National Theatre's NT Live screenings last night for the first time -- Ivo van Hove's All About Eve with Gillian Anderson and a few new PJ Harvey songs. Really well shot/edited live performance, and van Hove's approach still knocks me out at its best moments. Especially the use of video for backstage scenes and closeups felt like he was taking what Lepage/Sellars/Akalitis did the generation before him and improved on it. Maybe I would get burned out after a dozen more of his productions but for now it really works.

Not a Sam Mendes fan, but his production of The Lehman Trilogy — three actors covering the 160-year history of Lehman Bros. — is one of the best shows I’ve seen this decade. It’s another NT Live screening, and $15 for a 3.5-hour epic is a pretty great deal compared to its Broadway prices next spring.

i saw the NT Fleabag tonight; solid show!

The OST for the outrageously good and crazy wordy"A Strange Loop" came out today - described by the Liz Phair loving playwright/composer as a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd searching for meaning by writing a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd who writes a musical about a black, fat, queer, effeminate theater nerd searching for meaning - and it's great.

Author is Michael (r) Jackson, so he names the lead of his roman a clef "Usher" and he's an usher at a Disney show. Highly recommended!
https://open.spotify.com/album/7vlAmEdZEOVdRUsB4fgrvC?si=1MkKwKxrSPKsLgS_qkobmg

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make theatre relevant again:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-hungary-orban-culture/hungarys-government-plans-to-tighten-control-over-theatres-idUKKBN1YA1UF

I am not into streaming theater really but I think this should work basically okay with a good set of headphones and was fucking great on broadway
https://stannswarehouse.org/show/the-encounter/

St. Ann’s Warehouse presents
Complicité
The Encounter
Conceived, Directed, and Performed by Simon McBurney
Sound Design by Gareth Fry with Peter Malkin
ONLINE | FRI, MAY 15 (2PM EST) – FRI, MAY 22 (5PM EST)
FREE
A live discussion and public Q&A will take place on WED, MAY 20, 2:30 PM EST (7:30 PM BST) with Simon McBurney and guests. Register here to join the discussion.
Please wear headphones to experience the full effect of 3D Sound Design.

oh great, thanks.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/racial-and-labor-reckoning-at-nycs-flea-theater.html

so....yeah, no secret I'm an amateur theater person. my troupe had done a theme two years in a row - pop culture movies done Shakespearean style. we started with Shakesp3are's Ghostbusters, which was mostly a modern-timed Ghostbusters with faux-Shakespearean language, developed by a troupe in Toronto and adapted for stage by us (I was Louis Tully). last year, we did a more ambitious piece, Shakespeare's Terminator the 2nd, which we set in Elizabethan times (so, swords and shit). I was the psychologist and other rando parts, and it was a blast.

this year, we were supposed to do Shakespeare's R3servoir D0gs (an existing script), and I was supposed to be the balladeer who sang all of the music in the show on uke, and obviously that was cancelled. however, that wasn't the original project - we were going to do a more dramatic piece, Shakespeare's S1lence of the Lambs, which a cast member treated. Director didn't care for the script, and we abandoned it.

well, after the world ended, he and the other author kept treating it, so we're going to do a filmed production of it. they cast me as....Buffalo Bill.

I'm more of a comic actor, though I can do dramatic, but, this is prettty left field for me (I did SAm Byck in Assassins, but that's pretty comic). so I do the "I'd fuck me" scene, which is now more of a monologue. I had to have a Delerium Tremens before I did that on Zoom and achieved the creepiness but unfortunately the comic side slipped out where I did the "I'd fuck me" line.

I am so out of practice after just 5 months, need some time with this!

(sorry, we were doing a Zoom readthrough, which I didn't specify)

lol, u go assassin

glad to have some form of project, but i think i'ma need unlimited takes

Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Pulitzer finalist this year) has two more performances Saturday 10/24.

Best example I've seen all year of how to do theater on Zoom in a way that doesn't feel like an approximation of a performance but is intimate, intense, and completely delivers the play. Takes play one night in Wyoming, with four hardline graduates of a conservative Catholic college reuniting, one of them an Ann Coulter-like Bannon acolyte. Really worth seeing.

I care about and badly miss the theatre.

sigh

i'm mega glad I crammed as many theatre projects as I did between 2018 and 2019 as this has been the emptiest theater year of my life since I was 16

I care about and badly miss the theatre.

― all cats are beautiful (silby),

exact same. the last thing i saw was a new staging of Nixon In China so i went out on a high.

jealous. i'd love to be able to see good theater from time to time. hi jed :)

hi map! :)

over the summer (cases were lower here then) i bubbled w some people for a "shakespeare in the parking lot" prod of othello (lav mics, radio transmitter, applause by honking). ironically i'm pretty sure it was our best turnout ever. people are desperate. hope you can get involved in something again soon neanderthal even if it's zoom.

saw a great 3 piece ensemble doing a performance covering about 60 years and a stack of characters in a thing called THis iS What She Told Me from the Crucible theatre in Sheffield.
Very powerful even if not entirely polished. Assume the closed caption was truer to the script and some of them tripped over a couple of lkines. But overall, like wow.
was hoping there was going to be a video to share but it seems to have been withdrawn.

Also did a play reading for Utopia tHeatre who put on the play I just mentioned. I read narration and some stage directons. Play was Wole Soyinka's Death & tHe King's Horseman which I really love now. Hadn't come across it before.
THis wasa spinoff of a Zoom course on African classic plays which was really interesting and is hopefully going to get a part 2.
Seems that African plays get little coverage in drama courses which is a shame since there are some really good ones and I would think getting to play roles from world theatre can only broaden one's craft.

https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2021/utr-2021/a-thousands-ways/
i did this earlier in November and thought it was well worth the time and effort. Tickets are free but you gotta RSVP now... spaces are filling up!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/experiments-in-audio-theatre-radical-and-retro

loved this play in college, wonder how it holds up?
https://www.todaytix.com/x/nyc/shows/22923-Beirut

Marisa Tomei, Oscar Isaac and Patrick Breen star in this thrilling reading of BEIRUT, the play that launched MCC in 1987.

How do we sustain the human spirit, hope and love in the face of a plague? We’ve been here before, in history and on the MCC stage. In 1987, Alan Bowne’s Beirut launched MCC Theater’s one-act festival. A play to remember, and one that is as relevant today as ever. Set in a dingy Lower East Side apartment in the 1980s, Beirut follows the story of Torch (played by Oscar Isaac), a young man who is in quarantine after testing positive to a nameless disease. His girlfriend (Marisa Tomei, reprising her award-winning role from 1987), refuses to leave him isolating alone. It’s raunchy, it’s real, it’s poetic; and it reminds us of the power of stories, and their role in fostering hope, solidarity and documentation of extraordinary times.

have i mentioned that dynasty handbag is god? dynasty handbag is god.
http://www.dynastyhandbag.com/weirdo-night

i have recently discovered the proshotmusicals reddit with lots of links to streamed theatre (and uploads of recorded versions) and it is a very good source, i would otherwise have missed a live production of toneelgroep doing three shakespeare tragedies in one day. i've otherwise found it hard to keep up with what's streaming from all the various international theatres (there's a big emphasis on international 'auteur' directors like van hove and ostermeier) anyway heads up for those

We getting alienated yet?

I went to this 💀 the actors were excellent but had to pause *after every scene change* to talk to the audience about youth crime or women upholding the patriarchy before getting back to it https://t.co/sj7qE6ipEi pic.twitter.com/S8pBRyE6rc

— Katherine Augustine 🍐 (@kebayf) August 21, 2021

Well that was a stupid idea

i directed R&J this summer and had to be p harsh w anyone who started raving about “brain development”, like turning 25 means life’s caramel center suddenly isn’t death anymore.

I saw Pass Over on Broadway and it was fucking great, go see that while you can

wanna recommend Strange Loop again as one of the best plays I've seen in years

I did see a local performance of The Frogs by Aristophanes yesterday which was very good. Pretty crude, very funny.
3rd year Drama course project from the local university. I think it was updated quite a bit not sure how recently. Had like nightclub scenes so am wondering when it was translated or reworked. Like obviously some of this was absolutely redone for this run of performances and evolved as the project unfolded.
But not sure what came from where.
Mostly female cast with a guy playing Dionysius and I think one other working sound or lights.
Hadn't realised the gender imbalance on the course. Interesting that it works that way and subsequently this play turned out like this.
Wonder if I've seen nascent performances by anybody I'll hear about later.

a few times a year the theater i work at hosts these vast scripted showcases put on by a kids' dance studio that rehearses in their own space for months; holds a single dress rehearsal in our theater, during the real-time runtime of which i design+program the lights+fx; then opens the following night. always a lil fraught and becomes more so if i have a conflict and have to deputize someone (last time i did this i did not see the results of course but afterwards the studio's formidable auteur demanded a reduction). cannot work this weekend's show because am starting rehearsals up the street for my own prod of the tempest, but was able to design the show at dress tonight accompanied by my substitute for the operation, ben, a much sharper guy and faster learner than last time who is very interested in and excited about the work and whom i'm not worried about, but whom i have had to train up for this v quickly. as we passed thru the office on our way into the house, the theater's exec director stopped us to say meaningfully, under his breath, "ben is an experienced theater tech." ben has run lights for our last few concerts, so we nodded knowingly and said "of course he is." we entered the house and climbed to the tech table. thirty seconds after the show's director sat down next to us and i made introductions, ben neatly clicked a pen open over his copy of the script, looked at the first lighting cue, and in a v winning dot-every-i just-checking kind of voice said "what's 'upstage' mean again?"

oh man