We really don't care about theatre do we?

Last month I've been to a Proust theatre adaptation.
My favorite shows are from Pina Bausch, Alain Platel en Jerome Bel.
I was more interested in dance-theatre than in plays really.

I think modern/contemporary dance is no big issue here either tho.

I am interested in musicals up to and including (some of) Sondheim, from a pop, maybe even rock 'n roll, perspective. But as a phenomenon today, I think there's little to talk about because they have almost nothing to do with changes in culture. I don't know if that's a cause or effect of their audience (at least in New York) - very old people and tourists.

Being a social outcast has some advantages, then!

But no, I really don't care about theatre. Not that much.

Thus I am "sophisticated."

I don't see any theater at all, really. I've not even been able to keep up with film for the past few years, and at some point I gave up even trying; theater's unfortunately even a step below that in priorities.

edmonton theater is really vivid and i try to see one a month, but it is prohibtivley expensive.

Quite so. This is the strength and the weakness of theater.

What about the differences between watching a concert video or being at a concert. The is more excitment and energy live, it is happening 'now', and there is no setbacks of use of media when seeing it live.

I think potentially theater could be one of the most amazing artforms, but I've never seen anyone do much good with it.

and Top Girls at the Guthrie Lab- no idea.

anyway the Guthrie is nice and usually lush and well-produced an stuff, and i get starry thinking about upcoming Shakespeare but it is warping my young mind by relentlessly beating on about the CLASSICS. etc. i really need to find myself a wealthy sugar-momma to take out to other theaters.

ok i got my tightpants on- i'm off to lurk 'mysteriously' outside high-priced Edina hairsalons.

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 people who think theatre is obsolete know nothing.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

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

the director for the show I'm in, who has done shows for decades and is an accomplished performer, kept confusing Stage Right and Stage Left when giving us instructions a few weeks ago.

that one at least I get since that one's easy to brainfart but upstage....is....up....stage.

that one's easy to brainfart

is it though

if you're directing, sure, because you're facing the stage which flips things in your brain, whereas if you're on stage you're facing the audience and SR and SL are literally your left and your right.

yeah everyone confuses SL and SR eventually. i'm not scorning asking about upstage either! it was just v funny.

we had a fairly disastrous tech rehearsal for the 0rlando Fringe yesterday, in which we didn't finish the light and sound cues, and didn't get to run the show at all. for Fringe, you get one four hour tech rehearsal...and that's it (unless you buy another one, which we didn't).

so tonight opens and....as expected, half the sound cues were late, lighting was all wrong, and we entered and exited in complete broad daylight at least three or four times. and we had issues navigating the curtain, which has a difficult to locate slit. AND I managed to lose a piece of my costume between last night and today.

but...nobody died!

things drastically improved, positive review from local theatre critic (for show AND me).

few pics from it

https://i.ibb.co/vJB3HhJ/283113619-692476275386095-6316558625155990583-n.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/dgb3XxS/283573100-692476142052775-7998236158147932870-n.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/cDGSxf3/283113619-692475638719492-9026594461226398902-n.jpg

FYI forks is 100% OTM about A Strange Loop

i remain shocked that it blew up as big as it did and that broadway audiences are flocking to a musical featuring a non-ironic number about a suburban buttfucking daddy hookup
can't wait to see what Jackson does next

You mean non-ironic master/slave complete with n-words and racism suburban butt-fucking daddy hookup

It was great. It was also basically him having a two hour argument with himself and his parents, on stage. I didn't really think about it at the time, because it was pretty dazzling, but yeah.

seeing this when it was off broadway and i had no expectations was a punch to the mouth
have not seen the new staging but it's hard to imagine anyone can be as good as larry owens was in the lead.

I'm pretty much retired from theatre now but the director I did the Fringe Festival with the last five years needed another cold reader for a reading of the terrible Moose Murders for a fundraiser.

So I'm here doing that tonight. Playing Stinky. They're so not used to be not being in their shows anymore that I showed up without a script and dude got annoyed, not realizing he'd posted it in the FB group that I'm not a part of cos I'm not in their show.

Should be fun.

*used to me

He just handed me the script and it's 90 fucking pages lmao like I was going to print that at home

The character is a 20 year old who wants to fuck his mother.

What could go wrong?

been stress-testing myself the last month or two: designing lights for one musical (the netflix adaptation starred meryl streep) while appearing as a high school theater teacher in another (the original production starred stephanie hsu) and simultaneously directing a student showcase because all of a sudden i actually do teach high school theater (in a neighboring town). the streep show's done; the hsu show closes this weekend; the school play's next thursday; next friday i start rehearsals as benedick in much ado. not sure yet if i care about theatre, but by the time i am it may be too late.

Benedick!! Love that guy

dang, when do you sleep?!

break legs in Much Ado!

thank you! tbh the only thing rly cutting into my sleep rn is stellaris. everything else just makes me need it.

benedick's speech about change (doth not the appetite alter?) is so major: you're laughing at the character rationalizing so you don't notice shakes has begun preaching straight to you about his core/heart stuff.

barbaric imo to expect actors to print their own scripts. there should be a big clean stack of them on a table when you walk in.

I saw a fantastic production of Much Ado at The Globe a few years ago.. the whole thing set during the Mexican Revolution! What I remember most is the guy who played Benedick was just so good at it that his soliloquies just came upon you without you even realising that he was doing one.. it just felt so natural, like he was just sharing his thoughts with us. Halfway through I'd be like, oh, right, this is a monologue!

Tomorrow we're off to see Vardy vs Rooney: the Wagatha Christie Trial at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End!

Over the past couple of months we've seen Jessica Swale's Nell Gwynn at the Oxford Playhouse and Lucy Prebble's The Effect at the Burton Taylor Theatre which is a tiny place (40 seats or so?) behind the Playhouse. Both excellent.

it's the most exhausting time of the year:

https://i.imgur.com/IIjgV1Y.jpg

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?"

― difficult listening hour, Thursday, May 12, 2022 10:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

update: this guy (not really named ben) is now my constant collaborator and has entirely taken over designing these dance shows; could not live without him.

Go Ben go

I've been thinking about trying to go to the theatre regularly in London w/o seeing any adaptations or revivals. Could be a fun challenge!

i was in the West End yesterday and passed by VANYA starring andrew scott and i was like wow, i didn’t know about that, i’ll see andrew scott in uncle vanya and i crossed the street to read the notices and finally realised it’s a ONE MAN SHOW inspired by uncle vanya and instantly i lost all interest can you imagine

Been going on about an album of Patti Lupone cabaret performances from 1980 called Live at Les Mouches an another thread but maybe this is a better place. From earlier today before the slowdown:

Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

This thing has such a cult there was even a reanactment tribute: https://playbill.com/article/diva-talk-chatting-with-lupone-at-les-mouchess-leslie-kritzer-plus-rogers-evita-on-disc-com-135109

From the other thread:
Been digging a live version of “Because the Night” by Patti…Lupone. She makes it sound like an outtake from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

― The Ginger Bakersfield Sound (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 9 March 2024 11:50 (yesterday) link

From this:
https://playbill.com/article/patti-lupone-at-les-mouches-vintage-lupone-club-act-arrives-in-stores-nov-11-com-155028

― The Ginger Bakersfield Sound (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 9 March 2024 11:57 (yesterday) link

Which was a midnight Saturday cabaret show she was doing in 1980 while she was in the midst of doing Evita.

― The Ginger Bakersfield Sound (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 9 March 2024 11:59 (yesterday) link

From old cassette tapes! Pretty appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMRF7PiJBAs

I found some weird casting things while I was deep down that rabbit hole yesterday. Maybe I will post, perhaps on a new thread.

Good in-depth review of the Jeremy Strong / Michael Imperioli Enemy of the People on Broadway. Interesting that it barely discusses the staging, where other shows directed by Sam Gold usually have conceptual tricks that overshadow the story and actors.

i wrote about "An Enemy of the People," those enviro-protests i somehow missed, Amy Herzog's Ibsenism and the gently troubling poems of Tomas Tranströmer, the allure of Jeremy Strong, and the inconvenience of telling the truth. https://t.co/JAekaWfHFS

— Vinson Cunningham (@vcunningham) March 22, 2024