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stllimelight · 6 years

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Go See a Play! What's Happening Aug. 16 - 22

Go See a Play! What’s Happening Aug. 16 – 22

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Voices are unleashed at the St. Louis Fringe Festival now underway in the Grand Arts Center.

Voices are soaring in the St. Louis premiere of “The Light in the Piazza” and Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars.”

Voices are having fun in “Mamma Mia!”, “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” and “The Robber Bridegroom,” which all end their run this weekend.

Voices are…

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kathleenkaiser · 6 years

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ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW WITH Director & Writer JASON REITMAN – Chatting about his latest film hitting theaters TODAY- THE FRONT RUNNER

(Photo credit – Kevin Brackett – Reviewstl.com)

ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW WITH Director & Writer JASON REITMAN – Chatting about his latest film THE FRONT RUNNER

Interviewers:

Kathy Kaiser – Matineechat.com / Kevin Brackett – Reviewstl.com / Dan Buffa – KSDK.com / Tony Mosello – Flickfanatics.com / Lynn Venhaus – Webster/Kirkwood Times & Cate Marquis – Wearemoviegeeks.com

How was your evening at…

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#interview #JasonReitman #TheFrontRunner #TheFrontRunnerMovie

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ismael37olson · 6 years

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The Power of Love Can Make a Zombie Too!

It's hard to believe it's over. It was five years ago that I set out to write The Zombies of Penzance. It seemed so perfect, so deliciously fucked up, and the process of "translating" the story , the changing of Gilbert's pirates into zombies, hardly disturbed the plot at all (though I later made some larger plot changes). I know you want to ask, so yes, I was seriously stoned when I thought of the idea. I immediately loved everything about it. I already deeply loved The Pirates of Penzance. I love zombie movies. I love mashups. Plus, I quickly decided that my approach would include an elaborate, though entirely false, backstory about the creation of The Zombies of Penzance. In fact, that meta-layer became an important part of the humor. We tell the audience Gilbert wrote these zombie lyrics, but then throughout the evening, we keep smacking them with anachronisms, four-letter words, and other morsels that Gilbert would/could never have written -- including every reference to zombies, which hadn't entered the awareness of Western culture yet. I loved all of that. The inherent wrongness of it all. More than anything what I loved most was the fundamental idea of telling a horror story in the language of English light opera, possibly the most "wrong" storytelling form imaginable for this content. That was the appeal for me, more than anything else. I love things, particularly art, that are obviously wrong or fucked-up. That's so interesting, and often, so funny. I also loved the idea that this would be New Line's second zombie musical, since we did the very serious Night of the Living Dead in 2013. And its our seventh horror musical, following our productions of Rocky Horror, Sweeney Todd, Bat Boy, In the Blood, and Lizzie. Should we also count Urinetown...? Throughout the time I've been working on this, I was always mindful of the fact that no matter how funny or meta-ironic my text was, it had no real value on the page. It's only a zombie operetta when it's live (dead?) onstage. I needed lots of people to make it into live theatre. That's true of all our shows, but since this was an awfully odd experiment, it was constantly in my awareness. When I talked to friends about it, at some point I'd always throw in, "...if I ever finish it, and if we produce it..." We held a public reading in January. To my amazement, 150 people showed up, and to my greater amazement they followed the plot easily and fully embraced my multiple layers of meta, my blatant anachronisms, and the four-letter words sprinkled throughout. The audience really loved both the ways in which I had stayed true to Gilbert & Sullivan and their traditions, and also the ways in which I violated that. It's actually a fairly complex piece, and I was delighted that many of the reviewers noticed and appreciated that. Paul Friswold wrote in his Riverfront Times review:

Scott Miller and John Gerdes are the responsible parties, tinkering with Gilbert's lyrics and Sullivan's music to create something more than the sum of the parts. The two St. Louisans have added modern references, profanity and a careful adherence to the spirit of the original operetta. Portraits of George A. Romero and Queen Victoria hang above the old-fashioned stage and its working footlights, hinting at the twin forces at work here. Romero is the godfather of zombies in popular entertainment, and Victoria led the society that simultaneously embraced Gilbert & Sullivan's jaunty work and harbored a morbid fascination with life after death. All of these elements come together on stage, to strange and often comic effect. . . . But it's not all fun and pop-culture riffs. Despite his lethal nature, the Major-General has a most troubled conscience. The second-act song "When the World Went Bad" cracks open the show's candy coating to reveal the darkness within. Stanley sings of his fears about the forces bringing the dead to life, and worries about the coarsening of his soul. Is he less moral than the Zombie King, who spares some people (albeit under false pretenses)? The Major-General kills them all, and then shakes with terror and remorse late at night. Is he worse than what he hunts? It's a question that harkens back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, which was Romero's own inspiration. The book also informs the finale, which is preceded by a delightfully ridiculous brawl between the Stanley daughters, who are in their bloomers and bearing cricket bats and nunchucks, and the zombie horde. Things become very dark indeed. But you know what they say: It's always darkest before the dawn of the dead.

Some people reflexively dismissed the show -- without seeing it of course -- as a stunt, a bastardization, a one-joke show. I'll admit that my new Major-General lyric is a stunt, but so is Gilbert's original. That's what patter songs are. Beyond that, The Zombies of Penzance is an experiment in form and content, it's a big over-arching meta-joke about lost and discarded works, and it's a translation in terms of cultural context and also in terms of themes. As I wrote in another blog post, The Pirates of Penzance is about how absurd and arbitrary class distinctions are. But though I changed the basic story very little, the substitution of monsters (zombies) for "monsters" (pirates) changes more than you'd expect. The Zombies of Penzance is about the Other-ing of those who are different from us, particularly by those who claim the moral high ground.

And also, because I cut the policemen from the story, and gave their songs to the Stanley daughters, who are now trained zombie hunters, it's also a story about women standing up for themselves, fighting back, solving their own problems. I was honestly shocked at how empowering it apparently felt for women in our audience when the daughters marched on in their zombie hunter clothes in mid-Act II, particularly I think for women who know Pirates. The journey's been five years for me, but it's also been two years for John Gerdes, who adapted the music and orchestrated it. He adapted and orchestrated all the music for our reading last January, then he orchestrated Yeast Nation for us, then he came back to Zombies, finished his work and incorporated my rewrites from the reading. And then John and his wife Lea played in the band for the show. So I suspect John will have some zombie withdrawal as well. This amazing cast has been working on this show since last November, when we started rehearsals for the reading. They have worked so hard on this score, both musically and conceptually. I realized early on that we had to apply the lessons of Little Shop, Bat Boy, and Urinetown to The Zombies of Penzance. The more seriously we take it, the funnier it gets; and in parallel to that, the better we sing the music, the more seriously we take that, the funnier the show gets. This isn't Evil Dead. To maintain the crazy meta-story, our audience had to believe this was intended to be performed at the Savoy Theatre in 1879. The more legit the music, the funnier the show.

And likewise, the better the craft -- rhymes, scansion, etc. -- the funnier the show. The Major-General's big patter song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Era Zombie Killer," is funny partly because the craft is good. Really, I guess all this is a lesson Gilbert and Sullivan learned long before Little Shop of Horrors. Almost all their shows are inherently ridiculous stories (about inherently ridiculous aspects of Western culture) which they present utterly straight-faced. No matter how wacky Gilbert's text gets, Sullivan's music is always straight-faced. This has been such a wonderful experience for me, bringing two of my greatest loves together, G&S and zombies. To quote my own lyric:

Hail, zombies, thou heav’n-made dead! Forsaken by the God we dread. Great metaphor for all we fear! All hail the end of all that we hold dear!

I was very lucky to find a cast full of really strong, funny, talented, fearless actors to bring my show to life, and almost all of them have stayed with the show since last November. I am very grateful. And then to get such warm, overwhelming responses to it! Look at some of these press quotes:

"Another triumph for New Line. . . a hilariously inspired joke." -- Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "The funniest show that New Line Theatre has ever mounted." -- Judy Newmark, All The World's a Stage "Both a nightmare and a delight — let's call it a delightmare." -- Paul Friswold, The Riverfront Times "Uproarious." -- Jeff Ritter, Critical Blast "It's amazing. . . so much fun." -- Kevin Brackett, ReviewSTL "A wonderful whirlwind of apocalyptic delight." -- Tanya Seale, BroadwayWorld "Reverently irreverent and witty. . . a delightfully fun, pointedly funny musical." -- Tina Farmer KDHX "Let the wackiness ensue." -- Lynn Venhaus, STL Limelight "In terms of humor and sheer musicality, it’s remarkable." -- Michelle Kenyon, Snoop's Theatre Thoughts

But our show has closed and my zombie journey ends, for now. We've already gotten a couple requests for rights to perform the show, so the Zombie King may live (die?) on. But for all practical purposes, the ride is over. I will miss these characters and this beautiful music, and this extraordinary cast. It was so thrilling every night when they sang the a cappella chorale late in Act I, "Hail Zombies!" -- such a massive, gorgeous sound (due in large part to music director Nic Valdez)! John and I will be cleaning up / correcting the script and score, and then we'll publish them on Amazon, so they'll be available soon. And I won't swear to it, but we also may be releasing a live cast album. And yes, we will license other theatres to produce it.

And don't tell anybody... but I'm already working on another "new" G&S show. No promises, but I may end up writing a G&S horror trilogy before I'm done. I can hear the heads of G&S fans exploding as I type this... Suggestions are welcome for source material for the third in the trilogy. I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits from Zombies. Thank you, St. Louis, for once again, taking a chance on us and totally embracing the insanity we've wrought. We owe you so much!

My zombie hunting habits, though a potent, little metaphor, Are really more subversive than the critics give me credit for. In nineteenth cent’ry operetta, comedy or thriller, I am still the very model of a modern-era zombie killer!

Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-power-of-love-can-make-zombie-too.html

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Love Is Love: Passion and Art Make for Potent ' A Man of No Importance' by R-S Theatrics

Love Is Love: Passion and Art Make for Potent ‘ A Man of No Importance’ by R-S Theatrics

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Passion drives the characters and the R-S Theatrics production of a miraculous little musical that has something to say. The title “A Man of No Importance” is a misnomer, for Alfie Byrne is a remarkable human being whose significance is mirrored in the faces of his fellow Dubliners. In a blockbuster musical theater climate that regularly serves feel-good fluff…

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Take Ten with Patrick Blindauer

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Rain, heat, humidity and bugs. Acting on outdoor stages brings its own set of problems, which Patrick Blindauer knows first-hand. He performed in three shows this summer, kicking off the season with Shakespeare Festival St. Louis as Costard in “Love’s Labors Lost,” then moving on to the Muny in “1776” and “Footloose.”

“I’ve never been as aware of the weather as…

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#1776 #Footloose the Musical #Lynn Venhaus #Metro Theatre Company #Patrick Blindauer #Patrick&039;s Puzzles #Rebecca YOung #Shakespeare Festival St. Louis #Stages St. Louis #The Muny #Upstream Theater #Variety Theatre #Webster University #Will Shortz

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Take Ten with Christine Brewer

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor BBC Music Magazine named her one of the 20 greatest sopranos of the 20th century. She has two Grammy Awards and a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. But once you are in the presence of internationally famous opera singer Christine Brewer, you know that there isn’t an ounce of conceit, pretense or arrogance. She’s likely the most down-home diva you’ll ever meet. Wh…

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#Candide #Christine Brewer #Lynn Venhaus #McKendree University #Opera Theatre of St. Louis #Ross Brewer #Scott Schoonover #Union Avenue Opera

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Take Ten with John Flack

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor One of the most versatile and lauded actors in St. Louis, John Flack is spending his summer working at what he loves, adding another comedy, drama and musical to his extensive repertoire.

He has been a member of Actors’ Equity, for 30 years, “right here in St. Louis,” and is grateful to be working in the profession.

“But my real dream is to continue to be…

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Mid-Life Crisis Rages in Absurd Comedy 'Sylvia' -- A Mix of Tricks and Treats

Mid-Life Crisis Rages in Absurd Comedy ‘Sylvia’ — A Mix of Tricks and Treats

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Oh, that puppy love. American playwright A.R. Gurney’s absurd comedy “Sylvia” presents a marital conflict caused by a pretty pooch. In this case, the mutt takes on human form and talks in perfect English. To buy into the conceit is to believe the female fur child in its interaction with her male best friend, and it’s apparent they are a tad too close.

That’s the…

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#AR Gurney #Gary F. Bell #Justin Been #Kay Love #Lynn Venhaus #Melissa Harlow #Miles Bledsoe #Stray Dog Theatre #Susie Lawrence #Sylvia #Tim Naegelin #Tower Grove Abbey

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Performers Light Up Stages' Exuberant 'The Boy from Oz'

Performers Light Up Stages’ Exuberant ‘The Boy from Oz’

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Although Peter Allen did not get a Hollywood ending, his remarkable true-life story of how he skyrocketed to fame through sheer talent, drive and his ebullient personality deserves a splashy musical as good as Stages St. Louis production.

“The Boy from Oz” is the kind of glitzy material that the company has excelled at for 33 seasons, their intimate stage a…

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Jaunty and Joyous 'Guys and Dolls' Opens Revitalized Muny's 101st Season

Jaunty and Joyous ‘Guys and Dolls’ Opens Revitalized Muny’s 101st Season

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Broadway’s glorious past merges with The Muny’s dazzling state-of-the-art present in “Guys and Dolls” for a sensational start to the second century that bodes well for the future. What an ideal show to show off the new stage and other upgrades made possible through the Muny’s Second Century Campaign!

As impressive as the changes set out to be, all the spiffy new…

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stllimelight · 5 years

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'Charlie Johnson' Has Something to Say in Midnight Company's Solo Show

‘Charlie Johnson’ Has Something to Say in Midnight Company’s Solo Show

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor In The Midnight Company’s charmer of a one-man show, “Charlie Johnson Reads All of Proust” is a good match for Joe Hanrahan’s storytelling skills.

He plays an average Joe, 75, retired from insurance, whose mundane Midwest life includes Snappy Seniors activities and family to-dos. One day, Charlie doesn’t realize that a package of cookies as a snack at…

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#Amy Crider #Chuck Winning #In Search of Lost Time #Joe Hanrahan #Lynn Venhaus #Madeleines #Marcel Proust #Midnight Company #Remembrance of Things Past #Sarah Lynne Holt #Tony Anselmo

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Cirque du Soleil Breathes Inspired Life into 'Corteo' for Arenas

Cirque du Soleil Breathes Inspired Life into ‘Corteo’ for Arenas

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Ethereal, graceful and beautiful – those were my initial impressions of Cirque du Soleil’s latest arena tour, “Corteo,” which is actually a 2015 show they have resurrected and reformatted.

Not ever having seen them live before, I was struck by both their artistry and their athleticism in a carnival atmosphere. Super-fit acrobats inside rings, on the bars,…

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#Chaifetz Arena #Cirque du Soleil #Corteo #Lynn Venhaus #Mauro

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stllimelight · 5 years

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World Premiere Among West End Players Guild's 109th Season

World Premiere Among West End Players Guild’s 109th Season

For 2019-2020, West End Players Guild offers an exciting menu of plays never or rarely seen in St. Louis, including a world premiere commissioned exclusively for WEPG.

September 27-October 6, 2019: Bill Cain’s Equivocation is a Shakespearean tale of intrigue starring the Bard himself. The King offers Shakespeare a commission he can’t refuse, to write a play about the Gunpowder…

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#Bill Cain #Bloomsday #Equivocation #Jen Silverman #Jessa Knust #Lynn Venhaus #Sean Belt #Shakespeare #Steve Callahan #Steven Dietz #The CRicket on the Hearth #The Roommate #Tom Kopp #Vladimir Zelevinsky #West End Players Guild

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Silly Shenanigans Ensue in Two-Man Tour De Force 'Popcorn Falls'

Silly Shenanigans Ensue in Two-Man Tour De Force ‘Popcorn Falls’

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor Spry actors Joe Hanrahan and Shane Signorino slip into 21 different characters to play the denizens of “Popcorn Falls,” a daffy mix of vignettes designed to showcase performers’ strengths while paying tribute to small-town personalities – and the power of theater.

This average American town, whose residents prefer to be called ‘kernels,’ has seen better days,…

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#James Hindman #Joe Hanrahan #Kranzberg Arts Center #Lynn Venhaus #Popcorn Falls #Sarah Whitney #Shane Signorino #The Midnight Company

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stllimelight · 5 years

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Local Producers Found 'Beautiful' Success With Carole King Musical

Local Producers Found ‘Beautiful’ Success With Carole King Musical

Former Muny Executive Director Paul Blake and Associate Producer Mike Bosner Left St. Louis for New York and Have a Tony-winning Show still running on Broadway

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor After Paul Blake listed “Carole King Musical” on a Muny survey one summer and it received only a few votes, he worried if the in-the-works “Beautiful” would draw an audience. His fretting was all for…

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#Beautiful - The Carole King Musical #Douglas McGrath #Fabulous Fox #Jessie Mueller #Lynn Venhaus #Marc Bruni #Mike Bosner #Paul Blake #Sarah Bockel #Stephen Sondheim Theatre #The Muny #Tony Awards #White Christmas

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stllimelight · 5 years

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'La Cage Aux Folles' Embraces Freedom -- and Sparkle

‘La Cage Aux Folles’ Embraces Freedom — and Sparkle

By Lynn Venhaus Managing Editor There is a sparkle that emanates, not just because of the outward snazzy sequined outfits and shimmery set in New Line Theatre’s “La Cage Aux Folles,” but also inward from the all-male drag chorus, Les Cagelles. Their unbridled enthusiasm for a show celebrating “Be Yourself” is obvious, and underneath their wigs and cosmetic enhancements, it’s endearing.

In…

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