Showed Up: Sam Mendes Does 'The Tempest' and 'As You Like It' at BAM @12:45 PM
The second of three seasons of The Bridge Project, a partnership of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic and Neal Street, is closing at BAM this week. Last year, Sam Mendes staged The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard here; this year it’s The Tempest and As You Like It. Two of those plays are romances, involving love but also magic, sadness, and personal redemption. One, written as a comedy, is regularly performed as a tragedy, which means that audiences see it as a little of both. As You Like It is a straightforward comedy, but here Mendes has added a torture scene, which isn’t very funny. READ MORE 5
Flicked Off: 'When In Rome' @12:25 PM
Somehow, we ended up at this movie over the weekend, just us and some girls who were really lonely. And a few really angry boyfriends. You guys. Little Kristin Bell, barely there. Josh Duhamel, a lunk with a nice brow. A plot (magic love fountains!) that not even Annie Hathaway could paste together with her face. And, what's more, a ghostly drive-by from Judith Malina. Born in the 20s, the daughter of German rabbi who emigrated to America in 1929, the twice-widowed avant-garde theater superstar has not had a film or TV role since the 69th episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in April of 200—as Paulie's nun-aunt who reveals that she is actually his mother, causing him to flip out. (Then she dies.) READ MORE 8
"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." @11:30 AM
You know what we needed most of all, in the year 2010? A revival of The Boys in the Band. Thuper! It opens February 21! Let us turn the clock back to 1968, when Clive Barnes wrote in the Times: "As the conventional thing to say about Mart Crowley's 'The Boys in the Band' will be something to the effect that it makes Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' seem like a vicarage tea party, let me at least take the opportunity of saying it first." Duly noted. And 1969, the headline: "'The Boys in the Band' Is Still a Sad Gay Romp." And 1970: "THE BOYS IN THE BAND" has just entered its third year at Theater Four on West 55th Street, and the damndest thing has happened to it. It has become a period piece." Other interesting Times pieces on the same subject: "More Homosexuals Aided To Become Heterosexual," February 28, 1971. 14
Showed Up, with Seth Colter Walls: Robert Lepage's "Lipsynch" at BAM @1:55 PM
Late one evening last week, while seated on the Wall Street 2/3 subway platform, a 30-something Caucasian woman in glasses and sweatpants interrupted my reading of Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes.
"Excuse me," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Surely," I replied, probably a little over-happy because my life is plainly more enjoyable than Bill Clinton's was when he was president.
"Oh," the woman said, stopping herself. "Are you a New Yorker?"
"Yes," I replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Because your hair is neat and you said 'surely.'"
"Oh. Well, yes, I live in New York. But that wasn't your original question. What's up?" I said, eager to move this subway conversation along.
On The Impermanence Of Things @12:53 PM
"[W]e come from a documenting area of our, you know, our genre. Music. Records. So it didn't compute to us. Theater people are cool with the nature of it, they like that ephemeral whatever, and they think its like cool, and I'm like nah."
—Stew and Spike Lee discuss the film adaptation of Passing Strange. 2
Modern Day Groundlings Defile British Theaters @1:40 PM
Back in June, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the poor etiquette of theatergoers, a trend that seems to be growing as deeply discounted tickets bring new asses to the seats. These are the people who use their cellphones during the show, shout or are otherwise unruly, etc. David Hyde Pierce recalled seeing "a family passing a bucket of chicken down the front row." Turns out they're having the same problem across the pond. This being Britain, however, things are much more exciting. READ MORE 11
'Avenue Q' Done Raking in Enormous Amounts of Cash @9:33 AM
And Avenue Q has just announced it is closing, with a final show on September 13th. The dirty puppet show "about 20-somethings who move to the city with big dreams and tiny bank accounts" (I dunno, I never saw it!) grossed $117 million, just completed a two-year national tour, and will have been the 20th longest running show in Broadway history. But apparently that is done now. Also tickets are still like $958.99, so I probably won't ever see it. 4
"Nine" And The Persistence Of Memory @2:27 PM
For my tenth birthday my mom took me out of school and we drove into the city, where we ate lunch at Sardi's and caught a matinee of Nine, a musical she had seen earlier in the year with my father and the soundtrack to which they had played in the house or the car with a fair degree of regularity thereafter. I loved it. I somehow did not grow up to be a homosexual, even though my parents also took us to the opera a lot. Anyway, I saw the trailer for the forthcoming movie adaptation on Jezebel today, and, well, whatever. READ MORE 18
Stephin Merritt Hates Your Kids @3:30 PM
Attn New York Parents: Do not take your children to see Stephin Merritt's musical adaptation of Coraline. He will eat them. 0
Tom Izzo WTF? @9:09 AM
If you're in East Lansing, MI, the Wednesday after next, clear your calendar: "Izzo Goes To Broadway was written exclusively as a mini-Broadway show telling the story of Coach Izzo's journey from high school to Michigan State to making it to the top on Broadway. The performance features music from several Broadway standards, including 42nd Street, Cats, Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera and A Chorus Line as sung by professional Broadway performers."
I'm not sure how to feel about this one. Have they invented a word for the offspring of "camp" and "meta"? Anyway, Tom Izzo seems like a pretty good sport. 9
Broadway is expensive @11:01 AM
Bloomberg's Jeremy Gerard, looking at the difficult economics of staging a successful Broadway play, wonders why it costs so much to put on a show. Neil Simon-favored producer Emanuel Azenberg explains it all for you: READ MORE 0
