I'm posting this picture of me with The Rockettes for no real reason other than it's me WITH THE ROCKETTES!!! 😍 pic.twitter.com/PAKc7LkmPZ— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) September 20, 2017
Patty Lupone: (Warning, F-Bomb dropped)
Needless to say, she has been added to the order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.
As I noted earlier, I think that Trump as Caesar is not particularly imaginative or interesting.(additionally, Julius Caesar is not my favorite Shakespeare play)
On the other hand, doing a Trump like King Lear has the possibility of being truly interesting.
The juxtaposition of a slightly delusional king and the mother of all dysfunctional families with the Trump clan sounds like it has some real artistic potential.
I am referring, of course, to the right wing butt hurt over the use of a Donald Trump character in the Shakespeare play Julius Caesar by the Public Theater of New York. (AKA Shakespeare in the Park)
I will note that that casting someone who resembles the President as Julius Caesar in this play is a tired cliche that has been done to death going at least as far back as Reagan, which might justify a bad theater review, but the political outrage is 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.
Seriously, the Republicans need to grow the f%$# up.
Remember passing mentioned I made that someone reenacted the Trump Clinton debates, and found that Hillary did ever worse when gender roles were reversed?
Well, it's going to play the Jerry Orbach Theater in Manhattan:
After watching the second televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in October 2016—a battle between the first female candidate nominated by a major party and an opponent who’d just been caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women—Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea. Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?This has gone from an interesting factoid to something profoundly weird.
Guadalupe reached out to Joe Salvatore, a Steinhardt clinical associate professor of educational theatre who specializes in ethnodrama—a method of adapting interviews, field notes, journal entries, and other print and media artifacts into a script to be performed as a play. Together, they developed Her Opponent, a production featuring actors performing excerpts from each of the three debates exactly as they happened—but with the genders switched. Salvatore cast fellow educational theatre faculty Rachel Whorton to play “Brenda King,” a female version of Trump, and Daryl Embry to play “Jonathan Gordon,” a male version of Hillary Clinton, and coached them as they learned the candidates’ words and gestures. A third actor, Andy Wagner, would play the moderator in all three debates, with the performances livestreamed. Andrew Freiband, a professor in the Department of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design, provided the video design. (Watch footage from a Her Opponent rehearsal below.)
The two sold-out performances of Her Opponent took place on the night of Saturday, January 28, just a week after President Trump’s inauguration and the ensuing Women’s March on Washington. “The atmosphere among the standing-room-only crowd, which appeared mostly drawn from academic circles, was convivial, but also a little anxious,” Alexis Soloski, a New York Times reporter who attended the first performance, observed. “Most of the people there had watched the debates assuming that Ms. Clinton couldn’t lose. This time they watched trying to figure out how Mr. Trump could have won.”
………
And this was just the first phase of the project: Her Opponent has been adapted as an off-Broadway play opening at the Jerry Orbach Theater, and its creators envision adapting a recording of the experiment as a classroom teaching tool to explore the complex ways our personal biases influence how we receive messages. The gender-swapping technique, Salvatore suggests, could also be used to explore the communication styles of different political figures in other charged confrontations.
Last week, it was The Tempest and a wrap party at Open Space Arts, and this week our was a musical version of Cinderella at Lansdowne High School.
Charlie played a revolutionary, and Natalie helped back stage.
Busy times.
The kids were in a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and I was taping it.
Two time Oscar winning actress Glenda Jackson took a 25-year hiatus from acting.
She decided to engage in a side career as a member of parliament.
Now, at age 80, she is returning to acting ……… playing Lear ……… at the Old Vic.
If anyone wants to make me happy, send me to London to see this:
It’s one of the most demanding roles in theater, but Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, will open a new production of “King Lear” on Friday having not stepped onstage for 25 years. In the interim, she worked to keep a realm together as a member of the British Parliament; her first act in her return to the theater will be to play a monarch who breaks one up.Please ……… Send me to London.
Many major actors take a run at the role in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a part so daunting that it’s nicknamed Mount Lear. It would seem especially so for Ms. Jackson, whose last performance came in 1991, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Glasgow Citizens Theater. Her return, after such a long hiatus, is highly unusual and, at 80, she is older than all but one of Britain’s last 10 Lears in major productions.
What’s more, she’s playing him at the Old Vic — a 198-year-old, 1,000-seat theater with an imposing history. Laurence Olivier was Othello there; Judi Dench was Juliet. “She’s part of that tradition now,” its artistic director, Matthew Warchus, said.
Before starting his job, Mr. Warchus invited Ms. Jackson for a meeting. He had tried to tempt her back into acting while she was still in Parliament, to no avail, and he arrived with “very, very low expectations.”
Her reply took him by surprise, as did her suggestion that she play King Lear.
Gene Wilder has died at the age of 83:
Gene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks; his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”; and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died on Sunday night at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.Mel Brooks movies were a part of my adolescence, and Mr. Wilder had a real skill in being both low key and hysterically funny at the same time.
Eric Weissmann, who was Mr. Wilder’s lawyer for many years, confirmed the death. A nephew, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, said that the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
………
He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn’s celebrated crime drama, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in “The Producers,” Mr. Brooks’s first film and the basis of his later Broadway hit.
………
He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as the wizardly title character in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971). The film was a box-office disappointment, partly because of parental concern that the moral of Roald Dahl’s story — that greedy, gluttonous children should not go unpunished — was too dark in the telling. But it went on to gain a devoted following, and Willy Wonka remains one of the roles with which Mr. Wilder is most closely identified.
His next role was more adult but equally strange: an otherwise normal doctor who falls in love with a sheep named Daisy in a segment of Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask,” in 1972. Two years later, he reunited with Mr. Brooks for perhaps the two best-known entries in either man’s filmography.
In “Blazing Saddles,” a raunchy, no-holds-barred spoof of Hollywood westerns, Mr. Wilder had the relatively quiet role of the Waco Kid, a boozy ex-gunfighter who helps an improbable black sheriff (Cleavon Little) save a town from railroad barons and venal politicians. The film’s once-daring humor may have lost some of its edge over the years, but Mr. Wilder’s next Brooks film, “Young Frankenstein,” has never grown old.
Often said about academe, but also true of community theater, apparently.
But if you're digging a garden, and you find HUMAN REMAINS, you should call the cops.
It doesn't matter how much work you put into the garden, you CALL THE COPS!
Theater people, huh.
It's complicated.
It involves theater people, and I can certify that there were no ocular injuries sustained in the process of obtaining the picture.
Administrators have ordered the removal of swastikas from a high school production of The Producers, the famous Mel Brooks film that makes fun of Nazism.
The New York school district that oversees Tappan Zee High School considers the inclusion of a swastika to be offensive and, possibly, a hate crime—regardless of the context.
“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told the local CBS station.
The kids in the play had a different reaction.These guys are responsible for seeing our kids educated, and I wouldn't trust them to cut their own meat.
"It's satire, not supposed to be taken seriously," said Tyler Lowe, a student performer. CBS notes that Lowe is himself Jewish.
It's not surprising that the teens understand the play better than the district does. The plot concerns a pair of producers who put together a deliberately bad, patently offensive pro-Hilter play in order to profit from its commercial failure. They are thwarted when the play is a hit—the audience assumes it's satire.
………
The danger comes when authority figures try to shelter kids from offensive ideas and symbols. It's better to let them behold the swastika, and laugh at it, than live in fear of it.
As Mel Brooks—creator of The Producers—said in a 2001 interview:"I was never crazy about Hitler...If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win...That's what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."
He played Seymour Krelborn.
He did a very good job, and his portrayal was remarkably dark, at least as compared to my recollections of the original Broadway show that I saw many decades ago.
He mentioned to me that he was channeling his middle school experiences, and I saw that.
He and Natalie clearly got their singing voices from my mom, because neither my wife or I can carry a tune.
He was the only reason that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was even remotely watchable.
He was the best thing in almost every movie I ever saw him in.
Natalie moves into the AADA dorms tomorrow.
She is pursuing her dream of the theater, and doing so on the isle of Manhattan, 30th and Madison.
It's the sort of adventure that every 18 year old should have.
Has your dream always been to run away with a cat circus? Then here's the job for you! Samantha Martin and the Acro-Cats are looking for a tour assistant to travel cross-country with a troupe of trained cats (plus a groundhog, a chicken and a few rats) as they purr-form at venues in cities across the United States.BTW, it appears that this is on the level, as you can see at their web site, which puts the lie to that old cliche "As difficult as herding cats."
Job Requirements:
1. Animal care experience - Daily, weekly and monthly cat care duties - including but not limited to general and advanced cleaning and care/welfare of animals and their living environment.
2. Out-going personality, a keen sense of humor, the ability to roll with the punches, a flexible schedule, a high comfort level engaging with crowds of cat lovers, open to new experiences, lots of fun and craziness. We travel in a tour bus and share RV/hotel rooms.
3. Physically fit - able to lift and transport up to 50 lbs of show props and animal carriers from tour bus to stage and back.
4. Theater experience a plus - purr-form front and back of house duties, stage management, operate the light and sound, and help on stage with animals and prop placement.
5. Work with volunteers - wrangle and train volunteers who help with the shows.
Pay varies by show and includes per diem. No cat allergies. MUST LOVE CATS!
Serious applicants only. This job is a LOT of work and time on the road, but also the opportunity of a lifetime.
Yesterday, I was kvetching about being in New York City because I was in the culinary center of the Hemisphere, but because it was Passover, and day 7, one of the 4 Yom Tovim of Pesach, so by the time we got to the City, even those few Kosher restaurants that were serving over Passover, were shutting down.
We were there for an audition for Natalie with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, a prestigious acting school (in fact the oldest acting school in the English speaking world).
It has a 2 year conservatory program.
Well, she got a call from them today, and she's in!
Much happiness all around.
Here is a video of her reaction.
Note, however, that this is about 10 minutes after the call, so she had already calmed down by at least a factor of 10:
In the immediate aftermath of the call, she was way more euphoric.
It was actually a bit scary.
