“Our job is not to put misery on the stage,” he said. “Our job is not to make it uninteresting, so that it is interesting to the two per cent of the population that likes the uninteresting. Robert Patrick wrote a play called ‘Kennedy’s Children,’ and there’s an Off Broadway actor in it, and someone says to him, ‘What are you doing now?’ and he says something like ‘Oh, one of those shows where they make the audience crawl in on their knees and hit them in the face with a bag of shit.’ That is not our job.”
Jobim and Gilberto belonged to a generation that had grown up with bebop. While the tunes written by bebop innovators like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell were often too volatile and complicated for contemporary listeners, Jobim found a way of using bebop harmonies—especially the tritone, or flattened fifth—as the basis for irresistibly lyrical melodies. One of his most famous songs, “Desafinado”—the title means “slightly out of tune,” or “off key”—is built almost entirely on discords.
I know that as an audience member I have this feeling sometimes: I see a show and there’s a weird chemical in my body that tells me, This is one of many performances they’re doing. I don’t like this feeling. I would like it to feel like it’s really tonight and never again!
Why aren't more playwrights offering us images of an age that's perhaps best characterized by the fetishization of the Dow Jones industrial average on the nightly newscasts? Where is the new "Six Degrees of Separation," John Guare's acute comedy of materialism, when we could really use a glimpse of the deception going on inside those megamillion-dollar condos that have been cropping up like Starbucks in the last few years? What about a new "Caroline, or Change," Tony Kushner's challenging musical memoir of growing up in Louisiana in the early-civil rights '60s, transplanted to post-Katrina New Orleans to help us better understand why, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, only one in five African Americans feels they're doing better than they were five years ago? How about a sequel to Lorraine Hansberry's classic "A Raisin in the Sun" to fill us in on what happens to the Younger family after the house they fought so valiantly to attain goes into foreclosure with the rest of the homes built on sub-prime quicksand?...
Comedy has historically been more adept at reflecting contemporary crises...Consider this an APB to the ablest of our comic playwrights--David Mamet, Craig Lucas, Paula Vogel, Richard Greenberg, Lisa Loomer, among countless other talents known and not yet known--to assist us in recognizing the tectonic shift that's been widening the disparity of wealth in American society and threatening the equilibrium of democracy. Rich or poor, all of us are affected by the new reality, one that makes it hard to feel secure about retirement even if you're lucky enough to live in a house that has tripled (at least on paper anyway) in value.
Somewhat inspired by the current stagehands strike on Broadway, and the writers strike nationwide, I had a dream last night, in which..:
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra went on strike. I was called in to fill in for a special arrangement of Mozart's The Magic Flute (the Julie Taymor production), in which the orchestra was reduced to one on-stage violist (yours truly), and one on-stage violinist, played by some 10-year old girl who was chaperoned on stage by her dad, and placed on the opposite side of the stage from me. James Levine conducted to a packed house.
At some point, police dressed in Cuban army uniforms came in to arrest both musicians and Levine -- but the music continued, and our disappearance went seemingly unnoticed..
I woke up 10 minutes before our alarm clock.
“People get married back home,” she reflects. “They settle down. They get jobs. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts and my things.’ But I don’t want to force it. Maybe it’s just who I am, and I have to give in to that. I had a teacher who was surrounded by objects. Maybe that’ll be me. Or, soccer practice with the kids in Woodland Hills.”
She smiles wistfully.
“People here live as children, living their dreams. You can do that for a very long time.”
'There is one dramatist who is emotionally conservative and that's Tom Stoppard,' [Billington] says. He points to the unsympathetic portrayal of the Marxist academic in his most recent play, Rock 'n' Roll, and talks about the way Stoppard draws on his experiences as an emigre from eastern Europe and the part the failed Communist project played in the narrative of his life. 'Tom is an articulate, reasoned champion of small-c conservative values.'
Stoppard treats Max's convictions seriously and allows him to score strong debating-points: he is, in fact, the first sympathetic Marxist I can recall in all Stoppard's work.
Worst, [Stoppard] refuses to give Cox’s absurdly doctrinal Communist (an intellectual bully only this playwright could love) his proper comeuppance. Such absence of moral courage causes the work to conservatively fade away, not burn out in a blaze of rock glory.
'Of course there's very little theatre which openly argues a hard-right programme,' [Hare] says. 'But the dominant strain in most modern art theatre is fatalistic. The tone of a great deal of avant-garde work, in particular, is of prettified acceptance of life's seemingly inevitable hardships. Some of the most famous playwrights of the past 60 years have reacted to suffering by implying there's not much you can do about it. As Beckett said: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity." The number of playwrights who believe the opposite - that the quantity of the tears is adjustable - is interestingly small.'
As Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom learned to their detriment, even the most witless musical comedy can make a bundle. The shameless hucksters at the center of Mel Brooks's "The Producers" found this out when "Springtime for Hitler," their toe-tapping salute to der Führer, became the toast of Broadway. Bialystock and Bloom...may have been crooks, but they weren't fools: They knew that "Springtime" was a crass, unfunny turkey. What's Mel Brooks's excuse vis-à-vis "Young Frankenstein"?
It's definitely the best show I've ever seen.
I think the most important thing in performing a piece of music, and likewise, even more so in the listener's apprehension of what's going on, is a sense that anything that's happening could have been something else.
"What am I, a robber baron?" Mel Brooks barks into the phone from his Upper East Side apartment. "I'm giving you a performance to enjoy. I deserve whatever the hell I can get out of it...For writing half the book, all the score, being around to assist the actors, do I not deserve it?" Brooks continues.
He rips into a list of earlier Rialto flops. "After 'Shinbone Alley' - stay with me - after 'All American' starring Ray Bolger, after four or five Broadway shows where I worked for two or three years and didn't get a paycheck, am I not entitled to 24 percent of the show, if it is a big hit?"
He's winding down now. "My argument is: I supply. If the stuff is really memorable, then I deserve a fair share of the profits ... if indeed there are any."
On my way to "Rock 'n' Roll," my digital music player shuffled its way through a song by the Pixies from 1990, one by Peter Bjorn and John from last year, and one by the Beatles from 1967. Kids I admired in college loved the Pixies, a coworker burned me a Peter Bjorn and John CD after taking a rare night off from watching his infant son to see them perform, and I was fascinated and slightly unnerved by my parents' "Magical Mystery Tour" album cover as a youngster.
I would never claim that these songs carved a permanent space in my worldview the way the Velvet Underground and the Plastics did for ["Rock 'n' Roll's"] Jan, or the way that Syd Barrett encapsulated a perhaps inevitable descent into obsolescence and confusion for Esme. They're just tunes with beats and harmonies, with all the comfort and chaos that implies. It's only rock 'n' roll, but I happen to like it quite a bit. Same with "Rock 'n' Roll."
Is there anything you've brought back to theater from your time in the movies?
The great thing about film is that it has a disposable element. You do it and it's done. That's a great thing to bring back to the theater, because sometimes it can get a bit precious. Just play it through, get rid of it. Don't play the grace notes, don't worry about them.
