Stage Voices

NEW E-PLAY FROM STAGE VOICES PUBLISHING: 'THE HOLY TERROR': AN ADAPTATION OF SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II BY KEVIN CONNELL

 

Praise for ‘The Holy Terror’:

 

“Connell's adaptation, which adds text from a variety of sources to an abbreviation of Richard II, streamlines the story and themes of Shakespeare's original, honing in sharply on one main idea—the notion that absolute monarchy corrupts absolutely. His Richard takes and squanders freely because he knows he can, and the very idea that he can be contradicted—let alone deposed—is radical. . . . The Holy Terror does not shrink from other matters, however: we still hear Richard ponder the death of kings in the play's most famous speech (wisely uncut by Connell). But this Richard's belief in the "hollow crown" feels more hollow than usual—Connell . . . never lets us forget that the movers and shakers of big events who populate this play are also just people, fueled by the same drives as you and me; this Richard never quite loses his petulance, even in defeat. . . . Not only has [Connell] succeeded in zeroing in, with real clarity and acuity, on a very specific take on a classic story, but he's also done a bang-up job of good old-fashioned storytelling.”-- Martin Denton (NYTheatre.com)

 

Kevin Connell’s playwriting credits also include Temporarily Yours (produced at the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Scotland); he is co-adaptor of the stage version of Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure.

 

--More information to the left of this post or--

 

Order The Holy Terror now from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002VBWFFY

 

Order The Holy Terror now from Payloadz: http://store.payloadz.com/details/762157-eBooks-Plays-and-Scripts-The-Holy-Terror.html

 

Visit Kevin Connell’s Web site: http://kevinconnellnyc.googlepages.com/

BOOK: 'THE PLAY THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: AMERICA’S FOREMOST PLAYWRIGHTS ON THE PLAYS THAT INFLUENCED THEM' (EDITED BY BEN HODGES)

(Patrick Healy's article ran in The New York Times, 12/28.)

 

Falling, Falling, Falling for the Footlight Parade

One of my favorite childhood memories is of my father’s acting debut in a community-theater production of “The Mousetrap,” the Agatha Christie murder mystery. I smiled in my seat the entire time as I watched my dad, an 11th-hour replacement in the role of Detective Sergeant Trotter, piece together the Christie puzzle, stealing glances at a script in his hat because he hadn’t had enough time to learn his lines. Theater seemed so fun and alive, an adventure. Soon I began writing plays and acting, both of which proved essential in overcoming my painful shyness.

It’s impossible not to recall such memories while reading “The Play That Changed My Life,” a valuable new collection of essays and interviews from the American Theater Wing, founder of the Tony Awards and a sponsor of theatrical education programs. Anyone working in theater probably would have something to contribute, but the Wing wisely chose to resist the commercial benefits of turning to stars for anecdotes. Instead it solicited insights from 21 of America’s best playwrights, artists equipped to write knowingly and movingly about the  ways that plays and theater gave them a calling.

(Read more)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/books/29healy.html?hpw 

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YOUNG JEAN LEE: CUT THE KING--LEAR'S OUT! (STARTING JAN. 7 AT SOHO REP)

 

(K. Leander Williams's article appeared in New York magazine, 12/27.)

Radical Shakespeare

A young playwright exiles King Lear from his own play. 

King Lear without Lear, you say? What would be the point? For playwright Young Jean Lee, it is to experience the Bard’s great tragedy in the most thrilling and freewheeling fashion—which is the only way Lee can approach a subject, as anyone who saw last winter’s acclaimed The Shipment can attest. Yet for someone whose plays have garnered so many accolades, Lee talks a lot about failure. One might say she’s made it part of her process. “Here’s how it goes,” she told me last fall, following the second workshop performance of her Lear, opening shortly at Soho Repertory Theatre. “I start with something that doesn’t work, and then I fail, fail, and fail again, until it comes together. What you just saw? I’m not happy with much of it. And it’s completely different than the first workshop a few months ago. That may seem nerve-racking, but it’s the only way I know how to do this.”

Theatergoers witnessed Lee, 35, perform a similar bit of anxiety transferal with her experimental The Shipment, which dared the audience to laugh at racial tropes and stereotypes through a succession of satiric tableaux, by turns probing, discomfiting, and hilarious. “I was disturbed by several things at the earliest stages of that work, too,” Lee says. “At previews, people got that it was humorous, but they were laughing in the

(Read more)

http://nymag.com/arts/theater/features/62897/ 

Visit Soho Rep: http://www.sohorep.org/current.html 

(Young Jean Lee's work is included in One on One: The Best Women's Monologues for the 21st Century and Duo!:  The Best Scenes for Two for the 21st Century—both from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books.)

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LIV ULLMANN IN 'THE NEW YORKER': 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE' AND THE WOMEN'S REFUGEE COMMISSION

(Rebecca Mead's article appeared in the 1/4 edition.)

Norse Goddess

Liv Ullmann—actor, director, muse—has been in town for her production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the other day she dropped by the Chanin Building, on East Forty-second Street, to perform a role for which she is less well known, that of honorary chair of the Women’s Refugee Commission. Ullmann had in tow a woman with mussed short blond hair and Prada glasses: “the Barbara Walters of Norway,” as Ullmann put it, who is making a documentary about her. The Barbara Walters of Norway—whose name is Anne Grosvold—was wearing comfy flats and carrying her own tripod, something that the Barbara Walters of America probably hasn’t done for a while.

(Read more)  

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/01/04/100104ta_talk_mead

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E. Y. HARBURG: ‘FINIAN’S RAINBOW’ ON BROADWAY AND ‘FLAHOOLEY’ AT THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY (UNTIL JAN. 3)

  

(Edward Rothstein's article appeared 12/23 in The New York Times.)  

Grandish Wordplay: Harburg’s Ish List

In Avatar Studios in Manhattan recently, something sort of goofish came over me, manifested by a persistent grin as I listened to Christopher Fitzgerald and Kate Baldwin sing. The cast of this season’s Broadway production of “Finian’s Rainbow” was making a recording for February release, and in this case, the musical’s leprechaun (Mr. Fitzgerald), slowly turning mortal, was discovering a new kind of feeling whenever he was near Sharon (Ms. Baldwin).

It was very like the feeling I recognize in myself when in close proximity to the best work of this 1947 show’s lyricist, E. Y. Harburg, known as Yip, which is why I was listening to this session. That is also why I went to a rehearsal for a production of the 1951 musical “Flahooley,” a less distinguished achievement than “Finian” but one in which Harburg was also verbal master of ceremonies. (“Flahooley” is being performed through Jan. 3 at the Theater for the New City in the East Village in a joint presentation with the Harlem Repertory Theater.)

(Read more)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/theater/24connect.html?_r=1&ref=theater

'FLAHOOLEY' at Theater for the New City: http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/flahooley.htm

 

'FINIAN'S RAINBOW' at the St. James Theatre: http://www.finiansonbroadway.com/

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JAMES THIERREE IN PARIS: WITH MIME, MAGIC, CHAPLIN'S GRANDSON CHARMS

(Jorg von Uthmann's review appeared on Bloomberg 12/24.)

Chaplin’s Grandson Charms in Paris Show of Mime, Magic:

Review

James Thierree’s show at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris is no less mysterious than his previous ones, and no less enchanting.

Thierree, 35, is tired of being compared with Charlie Chaplin, his grandfather, whom he eerily resembles. Let’s simply say that irrespective of his famed lineage, he’s one of France’s most original performers.

Like Chaplin, he has shunned spoken theater in favor of mime, which has a venerable history in France. Those who have seen Marcel Carne’s 1945 movie “Les Enfants du Paradis” will recall Jean-Louis Barrault in the role of Debureau, playing the white-clad, ever-hopeful, always disappointed Pierrot.

Another celebrated forerunner was Marcel Marceau and his creature Bip, the white-faced clown with sailor trousers and a striped jacket. The heretofore nameless heir to Pierrot and Bip is called Raoul.

(Read more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aJenz8WVk.MU

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BOOK: MICHAEL SLATER'S 'CHARLES DICKENS' (THE WRITER AND PERFORMER)

(Adam Thirwell's article appeared December 19, 2009 in The New Republic.)

The Animator

Charles Dickens

Michael Slater

Yale University Press, 696 pp., $35

I.

For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner Henry Mayhew, there were 300,000 dustbins, 300,000 cesspools, and three million chimneys. It was there that the truly modern was invented: industrial, overpopulated dirt. Its symbol was the slum. London was managed by a majority of minority trades, all in the business of garbage: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers. And London’s greatest describer, who converted the ghostly industrial city into a new world of words, was a novelist who could taxonomically and poetically enumerate, say, the varieties of polluted fog: “Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black.”

And yet, in public, this same writer could also put on an act like this:

Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful,--to my death-in the principles which have won your approval. [Loud applause.]

Charles Dickens gave this sincere speech in Sheffield, the city of steel factories, in December 1855, on being presented by the mayor with a service of cutlery. It is unbelievable, perhaps, but it is true: that, too, is the voice of the most avant-garde European novelist of the nineteenth century.

Of all his impersonations, Dickens’s greatest was his fluent mimicry of what the bourgeois public imagined that a novelist should be--through prefaces to his novels, which offered doctored accounts of their geneses as serial sketches in magazines; through his efforts on behalf of the Guild of Literature and Art, or his work with the Royal Literary Fund; through his collected editions (he supervised the following editions: the Charles Dickens, the Cheap, the Library, the Diamond, the People’s, and the Hachette). He had a mania for canonization, for the public paraphernalia of authorship.

(Read more)

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-animator

View on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dickens-Michael-Slater/dp/0300112076/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261781628&sr=8-1

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OBERAMMERGAU, GERMANY PASSION PLAY 2010: MAY-OCTOBER

 

(Craig Lord's article appeared in the Times of London 12/23.)   

Christ not Christmas: Passion Play 2010

The 5-hour Passion Play has more than 2,000 actors and has been staged every ten years in Oberammergau, Germany, since the 17th century

Bavaria, land of beer, busty blondes, blokes in leather pants, bracing air, breath-taking views, the bounce and boom of horn and pipe.

A place to take your Oom-pah with a hearty dose of therapeutic salts. But there is something more sobering in the soul of a state that urges visitors to get out their get up and go.

At the deep root of this Catholic corner of Germany lies Oberammergau. Its business is Passion. The Passion. And it has been that way since God was judged to have tested faith with a Plague back in the 17th Century.

We got our first glimpse of the repercussions long before reaching an Alpine village unique to the world. He was sitting at the wheel of our bus at Munich Airport. The absence of matching red outfit, fluffy white collars, black belt, boots and chunky bag fooled few.

(Read more)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/history_and_travel/article6966546.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

Visit the Web site for the Oberammergau Passion Play: http://www.oberammergau-passion.com/en-us/home/home.html

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SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS: AMY WINEHOUSE CHARGED WITH ASSAULT AFTER ALLEGEDLY ATTACKING A THEATRE MANAGER AT A PERFORMANCE OF ‘CINDERELLA’, STARRING MICKEY ROONEY

 

(Anita Singh's article appeared in the Telegraph, 12/23.) 

 

Amy Winehouse charged with assault

Amy Winehouse has been charged with assault and a public order offence after allegedly attacking a theatre manager at a pantomime performance of Cinderella.

She allegedly lashed out at 27-year-old Richard Pound during the show at Milton Keynes Theatre, which stars Mickey Rooney, Anthea Turner and Bobby Davro.

According to reports, Winehouse disrupted the performance last Saturday night by repeatedly yelling: "He's ------- behind you!" Witnesses claimed she referred to the Ugly Sisters as "bitches" and reduced children in the audience to tears.

(Read more)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6874780/Amy-Winehouse-charged-with-assault.html

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DECADE'S BEST NEW YORK THEATRE (FEINGOLD)

 

(Michael Feingold's article appeared 12/22 in the Village Voice.)

The Decade's Best Theater

From undervalued plays and underfunded companies, 10 years of freewheeling joy

I hate 10-best lists, and this column won't include one. Trying to list everything that was great in the New York theater over the past decade, and then sweating to squeeze a mingy string of 10 items from it, would be futile as well as exhausting. Of course our theater touched on greatness between 2000 and 2009; otherwise people would have given up on it long before. Just as obviously, it lapsed, often, into the mediocre, the third-rate, and the sheerly miserable: Every great city's theater does that in every decade. One way we measure greatness is by its distance from the dismal points below.

The greatest thing to happen in New York theater, this past decade, was foreign, unrecapturable, and only here on brief visits to Brooklyn. Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) sent three last productions by Ingmar Bergman to BAM: Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, Schiller's Mary Stuart, and Bergman's own adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts—all lightning-bolt lessons in directing, in acting, in clarity of conception and cogency of image. Even the luckiest theatergoer gets few such occasions in a lifetime.

(Read more)

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-12-22/theater/the-decade-s-best-theater/

Visit Theatre for a New Audience: http://www.tfana.org/index.html

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HUGH GRANT: THEATRE "ENJOYABLE ABOUT 1 TIME IN 20"

(Nosheen Iqbal's article appeared in the Guardian, 12/22.) 

Is Hugh Grant right about the trouble with theatre?

Watching a play is enjoyable 'about one time in 20', claims the Bridget Jones and Four Weddings star. He might be on to something

Aaahh, Hugh Grant. Champion of posh stutterers, king of past-it bachelors everywhere. When he's not perfecting his surprised, wide-eyed bumbling on screen or buying Warhols while drunk, it seems that Grant can be found offering insights into the tortured state of the average theatregoer.

"I personally find going to the theatre is enjoyable about one time in 20", he told World Entertainment News Network (WENN) last week. "The other 19 you're just going, 'Oh, come on. Let's get to the end of it and have a drink'". One might carp that these are brave words coming from a man currently doing the publicity rounds for trite romcom Did You Hear About the Morgans? – and whose own oeuvre includes the woefully tedious American Dreamz and Two Weeks Notice. But let's not be petty. Grant is, after all, our unofficial ambassador to the world of what an English gent should officially look and sound like; if he thinks one of our great national artforms is sheltering behind pretension and piety, we should jolly well sit up and listen.

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/dec/22/hugh-grant-bad-theatre

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