Stage Voices

FESTIVAL/TOKYO SPEAKS WITH A DEFIANT VOICE

(Nobuko Tanaka’s article appeared in the Japan Times, 10/6.)

Press conferences are usually upbeat affairs, but at the one held to herald Festival/Tokyo — a two-month theater festival that kicks off Oct. 15 — Artistic Director Sachio Ichimura appears looking worried and begins proceedings by bemoaning the event’s financial situation and wondering aloud about its future.

It was quite a shock considering F/T is one of the country’s top theater happenings, and an annual must-see for many.

So, to discover what was going on, I sought out several people involved with the event. Gradually it became clear to me that the capital’s entire arts landscape is in the throes of unannounced seismic shifts.

A key sign of the change came when Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s new governor, appeared in Minami Ikebukuro Park one recent sunny afternoon at the official opening ceremony for something called Tokyo Metropolitan Festival 2016.

(Read more)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ACTORS, MUSICIANS, AND SCHOLARS COLLABORATE ON A RESTORATION SHAKESPEARE PLAY

(Richard Schoch’s article appeared in Folger Shakespeare Library, 9/28; via Pam Green.)

Part of what makes the Folger Shakespeare Library special is that while scholars are busy creating new knowledge in the reading rooms, actors and musicians in the adjacent theater are busy creating world-class performances. Amazing things result when scholars and artists break down the wall that traditionally separates them and start collaborating.

That’s what happened in November 2014, when Folger Institute, Folger Theatre, and Folger Consort joined forces to explore Restoration Shakespeare: the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays that were popular with audiences from 1660 to about 1710.  As spectators like Samuel Pepys noted, what made these performances so appealing was their winning combination of acting, music, and dance.

The performance of Restoration Shakespeare—how it lived on the stage—was the focus of the workshop that I jointly directed with the musicologist Amanda Winkler from Syracuse University. Over three days, we brought together theatre and music scholars, actors, singers, and musicians—including Folger Consort’s Bob Eisenstein—to explore Charles Gildon’s adaptation of Measure for Measure (1700), which includes Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (c. 1689) presented as three separate musical interludes—that is, entertainment for both the audience and the characters within the play.

(Read more)

http://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2016/09/28/restoration-shakespeare-measure-for-measure/

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

RADIO BECKETT WITH STEPHEN REA AND IAN MCKELLEN

(Listen now on Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07xhfd7 )

Matthew Sweet presents a sequence of radio plays by Samuel Beckett, with Stephen Rea and Ian McKellen. Newly recorded in binaural sound as part of Radio 3's 70th season which celebrates seven decades of pioneering music and culture since the founding of the Third Programme.

Like no other dramatist, Beckett's works capture the pathos and irony of modern life.

In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio, including the BBC's Third Programme. These plays are suffused with a musicality which, though evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly remarkable in this medium. They are concerned with human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication.

With the exception of the monologue FROM AN ABANDONED WORK, the plays can be heard in binaural surround sound. Just wear your headphones.

The plays will give a great insight into the development of Beckett's style and into his approach to sound. Increasingly different in tone and conception from his stage work, the radio plays become more abstract as characters become less individualised and more representative.

FROM AN ABANDONED WORK performed by Stephen Rea

ROUGH FOR RADIO 1 
He ..... Ron Cook
She ..... Monica Dolan

ROUGH FOR RADIO 2
Animator ..... Stephen Dillane
Stenographer ..... Louise Brealey
Fox ..... Brian Protheroe
Dick ..... Nick Underwood

WORDS AND MUSIC 
Croak ..... Ian McKellen
Words ..... Carl Prekopp

CASCANDO 
Voice ..... Stanley Townsend
Opener ..... David Seddon

Music composed and directed by Roger Goula
Composer's assistant: Jessica Jones

Music performed by 
Piano: Kit Downes
Violin: Georgia Hannant
Viola: Oli Langford
Bass Clarinet: Nicola Baigent
Flute: Michael Liu
Cellist: Raphael Lang
Synth: Jessica Jones

Directed by Gaynor Macfarlane.

Photo: LA Times.

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

PARIS OPERA OFFERING HEAVILY DISCOUNTED SEATS TO YOUNG PEOPLE

 

(from France 24, 10/3.)

The Paris Opéra has this year extended its programme offering heavily discounted seats to young people, enabling many of them to attend a performance of opera or dance for the first time.

The opera is most commonly associated with greying audiences in fur stoles and business suits, but the crowd filling the seats at the Opéra Bastille’s staging of Samson and Dalila on Saturday night had a much more youthful vibe.

The event was one of 13 preview performances of ballet and opera that are being opened this season exclusively to audiences under the age of 28 for just 10 euros a seat. Tickets go on sale about a month before each performance (the calendar is on their website), but would-be culture consumers must act quickly, as the house sells out in under 20 minutes.

(Read more)

http://www.france24.com/en/20161003-paris-opera-lures-millennials-high-brow-art

Visit the Paris Opera: https://www.operadeparis.fr/en

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

***** STOPPARD: ‘TRAVESTIES’ (SV PICK, UK)

(Dominic Cavendish’s article appeared in the Telegraph, 10/4.)

The good fortunes of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s revival of this golden oldie from the Tom Stoppard back-catalogue – sold out before its opening night – owe not a little to the twinkly-eyed presence in the cast of Tom Hollander.

This year, the much-loved actor has attracted new fans and neatly overturned many people’s assumptions about his cosy gentility (an inevitable by-product of his unmissable self-penned sitcom Rev) by playing Hugh Laurie’s distinctly unholy side-kick “Corky” in The Night Manager.

(Read more)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/travesties-menier-chocolate-factory-review-tom-hollander-is-hila/

Photos: UK Telegraph.

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

GORDON DAVIDSON, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF MARK TAPER FORUM, REST IN PEACE (1933-2016)

(William Grimes’s article appeared in The New York Times, 10/3; via Pam Green.)

Gordon Davidson, who as artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum for nearly 40 years helped establish Los Angeles as a West Coast capital of regional theater and challenged audiences with socially conscious plays, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 83.

His wife, Judi Davidson, said he had collapsed at a family dinner. She said the cause of death had not been determined.

Mr. Davidson, who was often regarded as the West Coast counterpart of Joseph Papp, the longtime director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, was a transplanted New Yorker who in 1967 was handed mission impossible when the civic leader Dorothy Chandler invited him to run the newly founded Mark Taper Forum, a 745-seat theater.

(Read more)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/theater/gordon-davidson-dead.html?_r=0

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] . 

TOM STOPPARD AND PATRICK MARBER: 'THEATRE IS ALWAYS BETTER WHEN PLAYWRIGHTS READ THE PAPERS'

 
(Rupert Christiansen’s article appeared in the Telegraph, 10/4.)

Tom Stoppard’s Travesties changed Patrick Marber’s life. “I saw it in a school production when I was 14,” he recalls. “It was my first encounter with Stoppard’s writing, and it radiated a glamour and intelligence that staggered and entranced me. It left me thinking that I wanted to write like that and be with people who said such clever things. That feeling has stayed with me ever since.”

Four decades on, and 52-year-old Marber (best known as the author of Closer and Dealer’s Choice) is directing a rare revival of the play at the Menier Chocolate Factory, with Stoppard at his side during rehearsals. Stoppard may be approaching 80 and garlanded with an Order of Merit for his services to the theatre, but he is devoid of Grand Old Man affectations, and he and Marber are working here as equals, with a relaxed professional rapport.

“Returning to it now, I’m surprised that when it was being written, I didn’t realise how strange it was,” says Stoppard. “All I can remember is that I wanted to create a play which passed through different idioms.”

(Read more)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/tom-stoppard-and-patrick-marber-theatre-is-always-better-when-pl/

Photo: UK Telegraph

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] . 

***** MARTIN MCDONAGH: ‘THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE’ (SV PICK, IE)

(Clare Brennan’s article appeared in the Observer, 10/2.)

It looks at odds with itself, this set, waiting for you as you come in to the auditorium; real and not real. A cottage kitchen seems as wide as a strip field. Along its worn-papered walls stand a big old sink and a scruffy range. Water will run from taps, smoke will rise from the oven, but above the back wall a vivid sky brightens blue or darkens with falling rain. Space is cramped yet limitless. Francis O’Connor’s design hauntingly physicalises Martin McDonagh’s text: everyday in detail, mythic in dimension.

A mother in her 70s, a daughter in her 40s: the pair live here, on a hillside by Leenane. Their only visitors are two brothers: Ray (Aaron Monaghan) is a messenger for Pato, who makes two return trips from England, where he works as a labourer (on press night, Marty Rea was roundly and deservedly applauded for his nuanced delivery of Pato’s fateful letter home to the daughter, his “beauty queen”). What begins as a naturalistic-seeming story of thwarted dreams becomes also a parable about loving and leaving (or not leaving) family, lover, native land.

(Read more)

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/02/beauty-queen-of-leenane-review-galway-20-years-tour

Photo Clare: Brennan: The Guardian.

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .

INT'L EXPERIMENTAL THEATER FESTIVAL TO BE HELD IN VIETNAM

 

(from Xinhua English, 9/28)

HANOI， Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- The International Experimental Theater Festival will be held in Hanoi on Nov. 12-19， with the participation of 23 countries， the Vietnam Stage Artists Association said Wednesday.

Dozens of art troupes from China， Japan， South Korea， Singapore， India， the Philippines， Vietnam， France， Germany， Hungary， Greece， Macedonia and Panama will bring their new plays to the festival.

(Read more)

http://english.sina.com/news/2016-09-28/detail-ifxwkvys2187205.shtml

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] . 

SCHMIDT/LOEWITH/RICE: ‘ADDING MACHINE’ (SV PICK, UK)

(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/2.)

European expressionism had a big impact on American theatre in the 1920s. It animated Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), but its most famous example was Elmer Rice’s 1923 satire on the enslavement of human beings. In being turned into a musical, premiered in Illinois in 2007, the show has lost its definite article but gained a new bite and momentum.

Rice’s hero, Mr Zero, remains a browbeaten number-cruncher in a department store. Told that, after 25 years’ loyal service, he is to be replaced by a machine, he rebels by murdering his boss and, after execution, is moodily transported to the Elysian Fields. Far from softening the play, the score by Joshua Schmidt and the libretto, co-written by Jason Loewith and Schmidt, give Rice’s fable a zestful comic savagery. A steady percussive beat evokes the rhythmic monotony of office life. A death-cell reconciliation between Zero and his contentious wife turns to musical dissonance. His encounter, on the eve of execution, with a repentant sinner prompts a richly ironic gospel number.

(Read more)

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/02/adding-machine-a-musical-review-finborough-london

Visit Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http://www.stagevoices.com/. If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at [email protected] .