Comment Archives: stories: Performing Arts
Re: “Barbara Gaines goes all auteur on Henry VIII”
Agree with your premise but not your conclusion.
I, too, admire Barbara Gaines as a leader who built something no one else dreamed of 30 years ago. I, too, have a problem with her directing. Coarse when it should be fine, profane when it should be sublime. Most painful memory: her wink-and-nod use of Cy Coleman's WITCHCRAFT in the music for her recent MACBETH. Painful - but not so much as the urinals at the beginning of Robert Falls abysmal KING LEAR.
But here she does all right by a play Mark Van Doren called "an imitation of Shakespeare, it is at the same time like him and unlike him." Helped enormously by the design team of James Noone, Mariann S. Verheyen, Anne Militello and Melisa Veal. Yes, I got a lump in my throat with the arrival of baby Liz. Babies do that to me. Change Walt Whitman, Tony, to a cutesy-wutesy photo of baby Adler!
Re: “It's Gertie Garbage's world”
Thanks! From my sights, Krissy Abdullah's name was the only one at issue in the press release. But all's well now, anyway.
Re: “It's Gertie Garbage's world”
Fixed, thanks. Those spellings were from the press release, BTW.
Re: “It's Gertie Garbage's world”
And Ana Norell
Re: “It's Gertie Garbage's world”
Note! Name correction -- Krissy Abdullah
Re: “Rick Cluchey performs a bunch of Krapp by Samuel Beckett”
I would agree. I is a little stupid.
I enjoyed Sunday's show.
However, at least on Sunday, there was no "with a changing roster of interlocutors". I will now take my question to the grave. Beckett might have liked that. Nothing to be done but I will go on. Tomorrow the sun having no alternative will rise on the nothing new. And my question will fade.
Sigh!
Re: “Rick Cluchey performs a bunch of Krapp by Samuel Beckett”
I think the person who wrote it would rather think of it as playful-and-attention-getting.
Re: “Culture Vultures: Fawzia Mirza on Queer Comedy at Zanies”
correction Zoran, Tim Minchin is the best thing to come out of Australia, Danger 5 can be second.
Re: “Rick Cluchey performs a bunch of Krapp by Samuel Beckett”
Okay, this performance is "recommended" by you and therefore by Da Reader -
so why the meaning-to-be-funny-but-just-plain-stupid pun in the headline?
Re: “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark pulls the mask off old Hollywood”
Is it possible you came across the websites meetverastark.com or rediscoveringverastark.com? Both of those were created by the playwright, Lynn Nottage, as a "third act" for the play. But if you check other sources, such as IMDB, you'll see that there was never a historical figure named Vera Stark. Nottage created her, based on the lives of other black actresses at the time.
Re: “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark pulls the mask off old Hollywood”
vera lula stark did exist they play is loosely based on the life of that actress
Re: “Pinter's The Birthday Party, now
menace-free”
I was so confused by this mess of a play that I stayed for the audience discussion afterwards to see what I was missing. There were a few opinions of what it was about but they all seemed incomplete. It is apparently a play that means whatever the viewer wants to believe. Its purpose was to foster discussion among audience members after the play about what it meant. I found there was too little in the play that made sense, so that further discussion was not possible.
However, even given that and what other audience members thought about the characters, the purpose of the second act which includes the "birthday party" escapes me. Perhaps it was to explore who the characters are, but there is no enlightenment here, only more confusion. Even Petey leaves at the beginning of the second act, apparently anticipating that the party wasn't worth attending but the audience is stuck there. I found no enlightenment from this play, only confusion.
Re: “At Steppenwolf, a flawed work signals a major talent”
Way too kind. Playwright sets the plates spinning in Act I - they crash, crash, crash at the start of Act II - then a nothing of a scene with Shelah and the angel/worker leads to a less than nothing ending. Production wasn't ready opening night? No, no, no - script wasn't ready. Someone should have told the playwright to take another six months. Plus pay more attention to the characters, less to the Bible. IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER remains McCraney's best work so far.
Re: “Pinter's The Birthday Party, now
menace-free”
I've been a subscriber at Steppenwolf for 18 years. I love theater. 4 of us walked out of this production. Tremendous waste of a great cast and 2 hours of our lives.
Every so often Steppenwolf puts out something odd and awful just to prove that they are artists. This is an example of that. It's worse than the Murakami plays they did a few years back and that says a lot.
Re: “In Mercury Theater's Barnum, a narrow view of the big top”
Hi, yes, we noticed. Horrifyingly enough, the same thing also happened to *both* Reader Recommends boxes in the theater section. The pages we saw as proofs were actually correct; some kind of technical glitch messed up the spacing when we sent them off to the printer and, rest assured, it's being investigated. Glad to hear you read the Reader on paper, though. Sorry for your difficulties.
Re: “In Mercury Theater's Barnum, a narrow view of the big top”
Did no one notice when this went to print on actual paper that the last full paragraph and a half sentence of the previous one wasn't on the page? What are you guys doing there?
Re: “Riding off into the sunrise with Dawn, Quixote”
One note: I've just realized that it's Walaszek's right eye, not the left, that constitutes a seventh cast member. Not to cast aspersions on the left one.
Re: “Pinter's The Birthday Party, now
menace-free”
The influence of a genius on a lesser talent is always pernicious, as is Samuel Beckett's influence here on Pinter. The latter is a hack who, as he emerged from the former's shadow, produced a few good, conventional plays and many dreadful screenplays. He is dead and soon to be forgotten. Beckett lives forever.
Re: “In Pedro Páramo, magic realism isn’t hocus-pocus”
"The hallucinatory realities described by writers like Gabriel García Márquez are only magical if you first posit a real reality defined by, say, linear time and three-dimensional space. Then, of course, anything that operates outside of those limits is going to look otherworldly. Magical." It doesn't feel like I'm "positing" linear time or three-dimensional space, it's just that when I try to exit my front door today in Chicago hoping to enter a street in Tang Dynasty China, I nevertheless always seem to enter onto the same Chicago street just moments after I left my house! PEDRO PARAMO is a great novel, and if not magic realism, then it is certainly some version of the fantastic genre of literature. As another poet once say, "When you believe in things you don't understand, you suffer: superstition ain't the way."
Re: “Richard's Cork Leg”
Thanks, this was excellent writing. I am a Swedish translator and dramatist and have translated the play into Swedish. In fact I got the play and the idea to read and translate it from a French man of theatre, Roger Blin, the man who discovered Beckett, and the first to stage Waiting for Godot in Paris. He told me this was his favourite play, that he wanted to direct, besides Strindberg's Dream Play, and now when I see your allusions to Beckett I see more clearly why. At the back of my head I had the same feelings of a Beckett in the play, at times. I wish I could be in touch with the director and cast and perhaps see a video version of this play.
Thanks,, from Leif Olsson leifol@yahoo.com