#the last time i saw into the woods (a community theater production of it) i was in high school and did not catch that the baker -

[haunthouse]

into the woods really is one of the stories of all time. love to force the narrator into his own story and kill him (because he's not writing you how you want to be written, because you want a better story (who wouldn't?), because he's easy to blame). love to create a circular story by later becoming that narrator (who is also your dad) (like father like son), retelling the story as if your point of view isn't just as skewed and just as likely to be fought against by those within the story. love it!

#kaylee.txt #into the woods #yes i just saw the bway production. most of my thoughts are 'jesus christ pippa soo' and 'the witch is kinda a milf' but im also like #rolling around the concepts of Narratives and Narrators and Agency in my head #the last time i saw into the woods (a community theater production of it) i was in high school and did not catch that the baker - #- ends the show by telling the story of what happened to his own son + how circular that makes it #its just. an endless cycle of storytelling!

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

Life Is a Cabaret! The Shimmering Kander and Ebb Classic Heads Back to Broadway Starring Eddie Redmayne

BY ADRIENNE MILLER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIEN MARTINEZ LECLERC

STYLED BY HARRY LAMBERT

March 5, 2024

When I was 15 years old, I saw Cabaret for the first time, at a community theater in northeast Ohio. Though I considered myself sophisticated in important ways (I recall that I was wearing a wide-leg Donna Karan bodysuit that evening), my experience as a theatergoer was then limited to The Sound of Music and Ice Capades: Let’s Celebrate. I wonder if my parents, who had season tickets to the theater, knew that the show wasn’t exactly “family” entertainment. Set in 1931 Berlin as it careens toward the abyss, Cabaret depicts alternating stories. There’s the doomed romance between a fledgling novelist named Clifford Bradshaw and a young singer of supreme charisma (and mediocre talent) named Sally Bowles. And then there’s the seedy nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, which is populated with a highly sexualized cast of misfits and overseen by a ghoulish Master of Ceremonies. The show’s ethos—the glamour and terror, the irreverence, the campiness, the unreality—shaped my taste forever, and I knew that I had just experienced one of the greatest works of art ever created. I would never look at theater, or life, in the same way again.

Over three decades later, I’ve seen more stage productions of Cabaret than any other show, including a revival starring the original Emcee, Joel Grey; I’ve seen the Bob Fosse film version over 50 times. I’ve pretty much always got one of Fred Ebb’s sardonic lyrics jangling around in my head. Today, it’s “You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein Herr,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Youthful exposure to Cabaret also turned out to be a life-changing event for the star of the new production opening this month on Broadway, Eddie Redmayne. “Weirdly, when I was 15, it was the first thing that made me believe in this whole process,” he says. Redmayne was a student at Eton when he first played the Emcee; he had never seen Cabaret when he was cast. On this late-autumn evening, Redmayne is speaking to me from Budapest, where he is shooting a TV series. “It reaffirmed my love for the theater,” he says of his first experience. “It made me believe that this profession, were I ever to have the opportunity to pursue it, was something that I wanted to do.”

Now, as he prepares for the transfer of the smash-hit 2021 London production of Cabaret (in which he also starred), Redmayne is reflecting on the power and durability of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece. “The show was just so intriguing and intoxicating,” he says, adding that the character of the Emcee posed many questions when he portrayed him for the first time, but provided scant answers. A few years later, when he was an art-history student at Cambridge, he again tackled the part of the Emcee at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At a dingy performance space called the Underbelly, he did two shows a night, the audiences getting rowdier and more intoxicated throughout the evening. He’d get up the following afternoon and stand along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile handing out flyers for the show, dressed in latex. “There was just a sort of general debauchery that lived in the experience,” he says. When his parents came one night, they were alarmed to find that their son had turned into a “pale, lacking-in-vitamin-D skeleton.”

Flash forward 15 years. The Underbelly cofounders and directors, Charlie Wood and Ed Bartlam, would approach Redmayne—now with an Academy Award for The Theory of Everything and a Tony for Red under his belt—with the idea of again playing the Emcee. Redmayne was eager to return to the role, but many questions remained—principally, who might direct it. In 2019 he happened to have been seated in front of the visionary young director Rebecca Frecknall at the last performance of her West End production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. It was an emotional evening for Frecknall, who’d been working on the project on and off for a decade. She and Redmayne were introduced, but “I had mascara down my face and probably didn’t make a very coherent first impression,” she tells me from London, where her new show, The House of Bernarda Alba, has just opened at the National Theatre.

Redmayne was astonished by the depth and delicacy of understanding that Frecknall brought to Summer and Smoke, a romance with the classic Williams themes of loneliness, self-delusion, and unrequited love. A few months later, Redmayne asked Frecknall if she’d consider directing a revival of Cabaret. “I said, ‘Of course I’ll do it, but you’ll never get the rights,’ ” she recalls. Those rights were held up with another production but were shortly thereafter released, and Frecknall went to work assembling her creative team—among them musical supervisor Jennifer Whyte, choreographer Julia Cheng, and set and costume designer Tom Scutt. Frecknall’s transcendent production of Cabaret opened on the West End at the tail end of the pandemic and succeeded in reinventing the show anew, winning seven Olivier Awards, including one for Redmayne and one for Frecknall as best director.

When Cabaret begins its run in April at the August Wilson Theatre, starring Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ato Blankson-​Wood, it will be just the second major production of the show directed by a woman. (Gillian Lynne directed the 1986 London revival.) In Frecknall’s version, Sally emerges as the beating heart of the show. “I find that most of my work has a female protagonist,” says Frecknall, who has also directed radical new interpretations of A Street­car Named Desire, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Romeo and Juliet. “And I have a different connection to Sally,” she says. “I was really drawn to how young she was…and how she uses that sexuality and how other people prey on that as well.” The role of Sally Bowles, originated in this production by Jessie Buckley, who also won an Olivier for her performance, will be played this spring by the brilliant Scottish actor Gayle Rankin.

“When I first met with Gayle, I was blown away by her passion and fearlessness,” says Frecknall. “She’s a real stage animal and brings a rawness and wit to her work, which will shine through. She’s going to be a bold, brutal, and brilliant Bowles.” Redmayne also praises Rankin for the depth of emotion she brings to the part, and for the vulnerable and volcanic quality of her interpretation.

Rankin arrives at a candlelit West Village restaurant on a chilly winter evening in a sumptuous furry white coat that would put Sally Bowles to shame. Her platinum hair is pulled back from her face and her dark blue eyes project a wry intelligence. Rankin lives near the restaurant and mentions that she has recently joined a nearby gym—not that she’s going to have much time for workouts in the coming months. Over small seafood plates (of her shrimp cocktail, she shrugs and concedes, “It’s a weird order, but okay”), she shares her own rich history with Cabaret.

She grew up in a small Scottish village, watching Old Hollywood movies with her mother and grandmother. At 15, she left home to attend a musical theater school in Glasgow; on her 16th birthday, she visited New York for the first time with her family. “It sounds like a cheesy, made-up story,” she says, but when she and her parents took a tour of the city on a double-decker bus, they passed by the Juilliard School. “I thought,” she says, “ ‘I am going to go there.’ ” The following year, she and her father flew from Glasgow to New York for her audition. She would become the first Scottish drama student to attend the institution.

At Juilliard, there’s an annual cabaret night, in which all third-year drama students perform songs. Rankin sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, but she recalls her acute sense that she could have chosen a number from Cabaret. “I think I secretly always wanted to be that girl,” she says of the classmate who did perform those songs.

A couple of years after she graduated Juilliard in 2011, Rankin’s agents approached her with an opportunity to audition for Sam Mendes’s 2014 revival of his celebrated 1998 Broadway version (first staged in London in 1993), with Alan Cumming reprising his Emcee role. She was cast as Fräulein Kost—an accordionist sex worker who is revealed as a Nazi—playing opposite a revolving cast of Sallys, including Michelle Williams and Emma Stone.

Rankin has recently emerged as a fierce presence in films and in television (The Greatest Showman and two HBO series—Perry Mason and the upcoming season of House of the Dragon), but then “it kind of came across my desk this summer to throw my hat in the ring for Sally.” How does Rankin make sense of this fascinating, mystifying character? “Everything is so sort of up for grabs…. People feel as if they have a claim over her or know who she is. And the real truth is, only Sally gets to know who Sally is.” She has been rereading Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin—the inspiration for the show—in which the English writer sets the dying days of the Weimar Republic against his relationship with the young singer Sally Bowles. (In 1951, the playwright and director John Van Druten adapted the book for the stage with I Am a Camera; in 1963, Broadway director-producer extraordinaire Harold Prince saw that the play could be musicalized and hired Joe Masteroff for the libretto and the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.) Isherwood based Sally—somewhat—on Jean Ross, a British flapper and chanteuse who later became a well-regarded film critic, war correspondent, political thinker, and Communist. (He gave the character the last name of writer and composer Paul Bowles.) For the rest of her life, Ross maintained (correctly) that Isherwood’s portrayal of her diminished her reputation as an activist and as an intellectual.

“Ross wanted so badly to write to Isherwood,” says Rankin, “and to condemn him: ‘You slandered my name. You said all these things about me that weren’t true.’ And as far as she got in the letter was ‘Dear Christopher.’ ” As Rankin builds the character, it’s this notion of the real Sally—not the fictive version constructed by Isherwood—that she finds so captivating, and heartbreaking.

The upending of Sally as an “object” is another core conceit behind the production. “I felt that other productions I’d seen had this slightly stereotypical male-gaze idea,” Frecknall says. She views Sally’s musical numbers as describing different facets of female identity. “Don’t Tell Mama” deals with the fetishization of youth and virginity, and in Frecknall’s production, Sally, disturbingly, appears in a sexy Little Bo Peep costume; “Mein Herr,” a song about manipulation, control, and female sexual desire, is in conversation with the cliché of the strong, “dominant” woman. “I think Sally’s very clever at being able to play an identity, and also play it against you,” she adds. The character “has secrets to tell us,” Rankin says. “Important things to share with us. And I think that’s the umbilical cord between her and the Emcee.”

Although Sally and the Emcee share the stage for less than five minutes, the Emcee’s musical numbers can be seen as a kind of meta-commentary about Sally’s actions. “What interested me was the idea that the Emcee was a character created by Hal Prince and Joel Grey,” says Redmayne, referring to the actor who portrayed the Emcee in the original 1966 production. “He doesn’t exist in the book Goodbye to Berlin and was their conceit to connect the story of Sally Bowles.” Rankin believes that there is a kind of mystical bond between the two characters. “As to whether or not he’s a higher power, or higher being, he does have an access to a higher knowledge,” Rankin suggests. “I think Sally feels that too.”

And who is the Emcee? A supernatural being? Puppeteer or puppet? There are no clues in the text. Prince conceived of the character as a metaphor representing Berlin itself. “The idea of him as an abstraction,” Redmayne says, “and so purposely intangible, meant that I actually found a new way of working.” Redmayne built the character from the ground up, starting with big, broad gestures that would be gradually refined. The “very fierce, ferocious intensity” of Herbert von Karajan, the famously dictatorial Austrian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and a Nazi party member, served as a particularly fertile inspiration.

Historically, the role of Emcee has been coded as gay, and embodied, in most prominent productions, by gay actors. Frecknall’s production had to address what it meant to cast Redmayne, a straight white male actor, in the role. “Tom [Scutt] and I felt very clearly that, well, it’s not going to be the Emcee’s tragedy,” Frecknall says. A person like Redmayne—given his class, ethnicity, and sexuality—would emerge from the catastrophe unscathed. Redmayne concurs: “As the walls of fascism begin to close in, he has the privilege to be able to shape-shift his way out of it.” The character’s journey is from Shakespearean fool to Shakespearean king.

In Hal Prince’s 1966 production, Grey’s delicate, meticulous performance as the cane-twirling Emcee is pure nihilism—as a representation of Germany’s conscience. In the later Mendes iteration, the Emcee emerges as the central victim: In that production’s chilling last scene, Alan Cumming’s louche Emcee removes a black trench coat to reveal a concentration camp uniform; a burst of bright white light follows, from, presumably, a firing squad. But in Frecknall’s version, the Emcee is exposed not as a victim of the system, but as the chief perpetrator. The show, she notes, “becomes the ensemble’s tragedy.”

“I was really intent that we cast it very queer and inclusive,” says Tom Scutt, Cabaret’s multitalented set and costume designer. We are sitting on a black banquette in the lobby of his hotel, across the street from Lincoln Center, where he’s working on Georges Bizet’s Carmen. To mount a revival of Cabaret in 2024, Scutt contends that “there’s no other way. That was really at the headline of our mission.”

There are two casts in the show: the main company and the prologue cast, which provides pre-curtain entertainment. In general, the members of the prologue cast don’t come from traditional musical-theater backgrounds, but from the worlds of street dance and hip-hop—“dancehall, voguing, and ballroom scene,” Scutt notes—and in the London production, some of the prologue performers have been promoted to the main cast. “There is something deeply, deeply moving about how we’ve managed to navigate the usual slipstream of employment.”

Part of Scutt’s intention with Cabaret has been to “smudge and diffuse’’ the audience’s preconceived notions. Inclusive casting is one mode for change; iconography is another. In this case, that has meant no bowler hats, no bentwood chairs, no fishnet stockings. The aesthetic is less Bob Fosse and more Stanley Kubrick. “We started off in a place of ritual,” he says. “I really wanted the place to feel as if you’ve come into some sort of Eyes Wide Shut temple.”

Scutt has reimagined the 1,250-seat August Wilson Theatre as an intimate club—warrens of labyrinthine new corridors and passageways, three new bars, and an auditorium reinvented as a theater-in-the-round. Boris Aronson, the set designer of the show’s iconic original 1966 production, suspended a mirror on the stage in which the audience members would see their own reflections—a metaphor that forced the audience to examine its own complicity; but in Scutt’s design, the audience members must look at one another. Access to the building is through a side entrance; as soon as you arrive, you’ve already lost your bearings.

In many ways, it’s remarkable that such a weird and complex work of art masquerading as a garishly entertaining variety show has had such longevity. Scutt has an explanation about why this piece—created by a group of brilliant Jewish men about the rise of antisemitism and hate, about the dangers of apathy—​continues to speak to us so profoundly almost 60 years after its Broadway debut.

“I can’t really think of anything else, truly, that has the same breadth of feeling in its bones,” Scutt suggests. “I honestly can’t think of another musical that does so much.” As grave, and as tragically relevant, as the messages of Cabaret are, he and the members of the company have found refuge in theater. Both Scutt and Frecknall grew up singing in their churches as children; theater is to them a secular church, a space where human beings can congregate and share healing. “It was made with such pain and such love,” Scutt says. “Which is absolutely the piece.” 

In this story: hair, Matt Mulhall; makeup, Niamh Quinn. Produced by Farago Projects. Set Design: Afra Zamara.

#eddie redmayne #gayle rankin #vogue magazine #the emcee #sally bowles #broadway #nyc #Julien Martinez Leclerc photographer #harry lambert #styling #best actor #oscar winner #olivier awards winner #obe #talent #new article #photoshoot

[uomo-accattivante]

Fantastic (but long) article about Theater of War’s recent productions, including Oedipus the King and Antigone in Ferguson, featuring Oscar Isaac. The following are excerpts. The full article is viewable via the source link below:

Excerpt:

“Children of Thebes, why are you here?” Oscar Isaac asked. His face filled the monitor on my dining table. (It was my partner’s turn to use the desk.) We were a couple of months into lockdown, just past seven in the evening, and a few straggling cheers for essential workers came in through the window. Isaac was looking smoldery with a quarantine beard, a gold chain, an Airpod, and a black T-shirt. His display name was set to “Oedipus.”

Isaac was one of several famous actors performing Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” from their homes, in the first virtual performance by Theater of War Productions: a group that got its start in 2008, staging Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” for U.S. military audiences and, beginning in 2009, on military installations around the world, including in Kuwait, Qatar, and Guantánamo Bay, with a focus on combat trauma. After each dramatic reading, a panel made up of people in active service, veterans, military spouses, and/or psychiatrists would describe how the play resonated with their experiences of war, before opening up the discussion to the audience. Since its founding, Theater of War Productions has addressed different kinds of trauma. It has produced Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in rural communities affected by the opioid crisis, “The Madness of Heracles” in neighborhoods afflicted by gun violence and gang wars, and Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” in prisons. “Antigone in Ferguson,” which focusses on crises between communities and law enforcement, was motivated by an analogy between Oedipus’ son’s unburied body and that of Michael Brown, left on the street for roughly four hours after Brown was killed by police; it was originally performed at Michael Brown’s high school.

Now, with trauma roving the globe more contagiously than ever, Theater of War Productions had traded its site-specific approach for Zoom. The app was configured in a way I hadn’t seen before. There were no buttons to change between gallery and speaker view, which alternated seemingly by themselves. You were in a “meeting,” but one you were powerless to control, proceeding by itself, with the inexorability of fate. There was no way to view the other audience members, and not even the group’s founder and director, Bryan Doerries, knew how numerous they were. Later, Zoom told him that it had been fifteen thousand. This is roughly the seating capacity of the theatre of Dionysus, where “Oedipus the King” is believed to have premièred, around 429 B.C. Those viewers, like us, were in the middle of a pandemic: in their case, the Plague of Athens.

The original audience would have known Oedipus’ story from Greek mythology: how an oracle had predicted that Laius, the king of Thebes, would be killed by his own son, who would then sleep with his mother; how the queen, Jocasta, gave birth to a boy, and Laius pierced and bound the child’s ankles, and ordered a shepherd to leave him on a mountainside. The shepherd took pity on the maimed baby, Oedipus (“swollen foot”), and gave him to a Corinthian servant, who handed him off to the king and queen of Corinth, who raised him as their son. Years later, Oedipus killed Laius at a crossroads, without knowing who he was. Then he saved Thebes from a Sphinx, became the king of Thebes, had four children with Jocasta, and lived happily for many years.

That’s where Sophocles picks up the story. Everyone would have known where things were headed—the truth would come out, and Oedipus would blind himself—but not how they would get there. How Sophocles got there was by drawing on contemporary events, on something that was in everyone’s mind, though it doesn’t appear in the original myth: a plague.

In the opening scene, Thebes is in the grip of a terrible epidemic. Oedipus’ subjects come to the palace, imploring him to save the city, describing the scene of pestilence and panic, the screaming and the corpses in the street. Something about the way Isaac voiced Oedipus’ response—“Children. I am sorry. I know”—made me feel a kind of longing. It was a degree of compassion conspicuous by its absence in the current Administration. I never think of myself as someone who wants or needs “leadership,” yet I found myself thinking, We would be better off with Oedipus. “I would be a weak leader if I did not follow the gods’ orders,” Isaac continued, subverting the masculine norm of never asking for advice. He had already sent for the best information out there, from the Delphic Oracle.

Soon, Oedipus’ brother-in-law, Creon—John Turturro, in a book-lined study—was doing his best to soft-pedal some weird news from Delphi. Apparently, the oracle said that the plague wouldn’t end until the people of Thebes expelled Laius’ killer: a person who was somehow still in the city, even though Laius had died many years earlier on an out-of-town trip. Oedipus called in the blind prophet, Tiresias, played by Jeffrey Wright, whose eyes were invisible behind a circular glare in his eyeglasses.

Reading “Oedipus” in the past, I had always been exasperated by Tiresias, by his cryptic lamentations—“I will never reveal the riddles within me, or the evil in you”—and the way he seemed incapable of transmitting useful information. Spoken by a Black actor in America in 2020, the line made a sickening kind of sense. How do you tell the voice of power that the problem is in him, really baked in there, going back generations? “Feel free to spew all of your vitriol and rage in my direction,” Tiresias said, like someone who knew he was in for a tweetstorm.

Oedipus accused Tiresias of treachery, calling out his disability. He cast suspicion on foreigners, and touted his own “wealth, power, unsurpassed skill.” He decried fake news: “It’s all a scam—you know nothing about interpreting birds.” He elaborated a deep-state scenario: Creon had “hatched a secret plan to expel me from office,” eliciting slanderous prophecies from supposedly disinterested agencies. It was, in short, a coup, designed to subvert the democratic will of the people of Thebes.

Frances McDormand appeared next, in the role of Jocasta. Wearing no visible makeup, speaking from what looked like a cabin somewhere with wood-panelled walls, she resembled the ghost of some frontierswoman. I realized, when I saw her, that I had never tried to picture Jocasta: not her appearance, or her attitude. What was her deal? How had she felt about Laius maiming their baby? How had she felt about being offered as a bride to whomever defeated the Sphinx? What did she think of Oedipus when she met him? Did it never seem weird to her that he was her son’s age, and had horrible scars on his ankles? How did they get along, those two?

When you’re reading the play, you don’t have to answer such questions. You can entertain multiple possibilities without settling on one. But actors have to make decisions and stick to them. One decision that had been made in this case: Oedipus really liked her. “Since I have more respect for you, my dear, than anyone else in the world,” Isaac said, with such warmth in “my dear.” I was reminded of the fact that Euripides wrote a version of “Oedipus”—lost to posterity, like the majority of Greek tragedies—that some scholars suggest foregrounds the loving relationshipbetween Oedipus and Jocasta.

Jocasta’s immediate task was to defuse the potentially murderous argument between her husband and her brother. She took one of the few rhetorical angles available to a woman: why, such grown men ought to be ashamed of themselves, carrying on so when there was a plague going on. And yet, listening to the lines that McDormand chose to emphasize, it was clear that, in the guise of adult rationality and spreading peace, what she was actually doing was silencing and trivializing. “Come inside,” she said, “and we’ll settle this thing in private. And both of you quit making something out of nothing.” It was the voice of denial, and, through the play, you could hear it spread from character to character.

By this point in the performance, I found myself spinning into a kind of cognitive overdrive, toggling between the text and the performance, between the historical context, the current context, and the “universal” themes. No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was.

Excerpt:

The riddle of the Sphinx plays out in the plot of “Oedipus,” particularly in a scene near the end where the truth finally comes out. Two key figures from Oedipus’ infancy are brought in for questioning: the Theban shepherd, who was supposed to kill baby Oedipus but didn’t; and the Corinthian messenger to whom he handed off the maimed child. The Theban shepherd is walking proof that the Sphinx’s riddle is hard, because that man can’t recognize anyone: not the Corinthian, whom he last saw as a young man, and certainly not Oedipus, a baby with whom he’d had a passing acquaintance decades earlier. “It all took place so long ago,” he grumbles. “Why on earth would you ask me?”

“Because,” the Corinthian (David Strathairn) explained genially on Zoom, “this man whom you are now looking at was once that child.”

This, for me, was the scene with the catharsis in it. At a certain point, the shepherd (Frankie Faison) clearly understood everything, but would not or could not admit it. Oedipus, now determined to learn the truth at all costs, resorted to enhanced interrogation. “Bend back his arms until they snap,” Isaac said icily; in another window, Faison screamed in highly realistic agony. Faison was a personification of psychological resistance: the mechanism a mind develops to protect itself from an unbearable truth. Those invisible guardsmen had to nearly kill him before he would admit who had given him the baby: “It was Laius’s child, or so people said. Your wife could tell you more.”

Tears glinted in Isaac’s eyes as he delivered the next line, which I suddenly understood to be the most devastating in the whole play: “Did . . . she . . . give it to you?” How had I never fully realized, never felt, how painful it would have been for Oedipus to realize that his parents hadn’t loved him?

Excerpt:

If we borrow the terms of Greek drama, 2020 might be viewed as the year of anagnorisis: tragic recognition. On August 9th, the sixth anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, I watched the Theater of War Productions put on a Zoom production of “Antigone in Ferguson”: an adaptation of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” narrative sequel, with the chorus represented by a demographically and ideologically diverse gospel choir. Oscar Isaac was back, this time as Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king. He started out as a bullying inquisitor (“I will have your extremities removed one by one until you reveal the criminal’s name”), ordering Antigone (Tracie Thoms) to be buried alive, insulting everyone who criticized him, and accusing Tiresias of corruption. But then Tiresias, with the help of the chorus, persuaded Creon to reconsider. In a sustained gospel number, the Thebans, armed with picks and shovels, led by their king, rushed to free Antigone.

“Antigone” being a tragedy, they got there too late, resulting in multiple deaths, and in Isaac’s once again totally losing his shit. It was almost the same performance he gave in “Oedipus,” and yet, where Oedipus begins the play written into a corner, between walls that keep closing in, Creon seems to have just a little more room to maneuver. His misfortune—like that of Antigone and her brother—feels less irreversible. I first saw “Antigone in Ferguson” live, last year, and, in the discussion afterward, the subject of fate—inevitably—came up. I remember how Doerries gently led the audience to view “Antigone” as an illustration of how easily everything might happen differently, and how people’s minds can change. I remember the energy that spread through the room that night, in talk about prison reform and the urgency of collective change.

###

Again, the full article is accessible via the source link below:

#oscar isaac #theater of war #oedipus the king #antigone in ferguson #creon #frances mcdormand #john turturro #jeffrey wright #david strathairn #frankie faison #bryan doerries #sophocles #zoom #the oedipus project

[dereksmcgrath]

That was a really good chapter, and I’m struggling to say anything deeper about why it worked. I will try to summarize why it all works at the end of this post, because before that I want to give some time for topics I haven’t discussed directly up to now--including Aizawa’s disabilities and Mineta’s sexuality. But let’s start with some specific observations about Chapter 325.

“The Bonds of One for All,” My Hero Academia Chapter 325. By Koehi Horikoshi, translation by Caleb Cook, lettering by John Hunt. Available from Viz.

Spoiler warnings for The Big O and Fire Force.

The interactions between Izuku, Kota, and the woman with the giant Quirk were handled very well, in paneling, facial expressions, and dialogue. I love how the panel of tearful Kota reaching out to Izuku is almost identical to Izuku reaching out to Bakugo way back in Chapter 1. It is such a good humorous moment for the woman with the giant Quirk to refer to Izuku as her “crybaby hero.”

And beyond how well these three interact, I also loved Aizawa from afar congratulating Iida for his handling of this entire situation. The most recent episodes of the anime have not shown much in a mentor-mentee relationship between these two, with Aizawa rushing to see Kurogiri at Tartarus and surprised Iida already finished giving the class announcements he was instructed to. The two have not had much in the way of interactions, so having this small moment showing Aizawa does pay attention to his students contradicts a lot of complaints I’ve made how Aizawa has seemed so hands-off, especially when Bakugo has been physically abusive to his classmates.

Speaking of which, Denki dope-slapped Bakugo. That has been a long time coming, and I love that small background gag making its way in the middle of Hawks’s rousing narration. I also spotted Eijiro crying and I think a cameo from Oogami from Oumagadoki Zoo, so overall, the crowd scene was well illustrated.

The final bit I really enjoyed in this chapter--aside from Kurogiri’s return, but I’ll get to that--was the man from Chapter 1 defending Izuku, by invoking one of the metaphors I hate: the stage.

The Big O is one of my favorite anime--at least, until the second season started, then the show became so meta without progressing any plot in a way I enjoyed, and losing the “monster of the week” format that I thought served it better. One of its conceits was that, spoiler, the entire series is fake, just what is imagined as a stage production, or a TV production, or someone who has the power to control everything--and, no, that’s a cheap trick, worse than Dallas or Newhart playing that for a narrative reset or a legitimate series finale gag. This isn’t St. Elsewhere, and Big O is not good enough for that stunt. At its best, The Big O was like watching Cowboy Bebop’s stand-alone episodes: I’m judging it by the quality of its beginning-middle-and-end plot. (Having Steve Blum, Wendee Lee, and others from the Bebop dub with major roles in the Big O dub didn’t hurt.) So, trying to add a second-season arc to justify stuff in the first season that didn’t need to be justified felt like a waste of the stage metaphor.

And another manga, Fire Force, just recently invoked the “what if this is all a fiction, like something on the stage” plotline and, no, God no, we are not going there, we not letting “it’s all a fiction” defend how badly that misogynistic followup to Soul Eater has fallen off the rails, good Lord, no. I was way too kind to that series.

So, I cringed hearing this man defend Izuku by invoking the stage, and Horikoshi and company drawing a literal stage with theater seats. But at the end, no, that metaphor works, especially when it invokes how we first met this man and Izuku way back in Chapter 1: they were watching Woods and Mt Lady fighting that giant like they were watching a live performance of a tokusatsu. Having that man chew out we in the audience for treating this series as spectacle for fighting scenes, and by extension criticizing Izuku too and himself, adds enough humility to have this moment all be easier to approach rather than feeling hackneyed: it comes out of a problem the series has had since Chapter 1, and that any superhero story will have (as I ranted about earlier this week, where the good guy had to fight the bad guy with nothing in society really getting better).

With the good stuff out of the way, that brings me to Aizawa, and ongoing thoughts I have about how MHA portrays people with disabilities.

Over the weekend (through Sunday, September 5, at 7 PM Eastern), the US Embassy of Japan has shared for free online for United States audiences the documentary Tokyo Paralympics: Festival of Love and Glory. As I am not diagnosed with a disability, and as I do not consider myself an expert scholar in disability studies, I leave it to people more familiar with the topics to evaluate the documentary. With that said, I do think the documentary is of its time, as within the first minutes the thesis to the work seems to be that to have a disability is to be a challenge of overcoming having a disability. I do not think that is the customary way of thinking about disabilities today, that it is something to overcome: a disability is something you live with, not necessarily something you think of as overcoming--the verb being used is the problem. Granted, I’m using “overcome” based on the subtitles, not on the original Japanese of the film. But from what I have gathered in disability studies, the focus is not on the responsibility of an individual to overcome anything: it is far more about what societies can do so that, regardless what a person has in way of abilities, they are able to participate fully in that society, as the definition of having a disability has so much to do with society not making access possible regardless of the person’s abilities.

I’ve talked quite a bit about how MHA started with this bifurcated presentation: it wants to show a shiny exterior of a world where people of various abilities all get to participate in society and function within it, before revealing that exterior to be a facade, hiding forms of discrimination, some obvious from Chapter 1 where those without Quirks are maligned, and some soon after, such as a gag strip showing the damage Mt Lady’s ability causes due to her giant size. Then we saw more and more forms of discrimination on the basis of ability. We learned how Shinso, Habuko, Shigaraki, and Toga’s Quirks impede how they may participate in society. We saw how the physical appearance of Shoji, Spinner, Habuko, and now in the manga this woman with the giant Quirk leads to discrimination. We saw how the size of the individual (the woman with the giant Quirk, Mt Lady, and Kamachi in Vigilantes) requires different forms of housing that are often not easily accessible, affordable, or in convenient parts of the city. And we have seen more and more characters who lose Quirks (Ragdoll, Mirio, All Might) or have no Quirks (Melissa) as analogues to having disabilities, and more characters who have what we accept in our real world as disabilities (Ectoplasm’s pre-introduction lost legs, Aizawa and All Might’s Quirks being impeded by physical damage, Compress losing his arm and now more in the PLF Arc, Mirko losing her arm and leg, Aizawa and Nighteye losing limbs and organs in battle).

I don’t know what to make of how Aizawa’s leg prosthetic is first introduced to the audience, as the scene is staged almost the same as how we first saw Re-Destro’s leg prosthetic in the manga: we see the prosthetic clothed in a shoe and a pants’ leg, and that is how much we see to indicate its presence. I doubt the replication of this staging is telling us any similarity between Aizawa and Re-Destro--I honestly think the staging is just a coincidence. But I do think, intentional or not, Horikoshi is avoiding a fixation, an attempt to focus on the prosthetic as if something has been lost, by clothing it in the shoe and the pants’ leg to communicate that this just is his leg now, it’s not an identical substitution but it functions as a leg, it looks different, it obviously is different, but the image will not fetishize it.

I expected Aizawa would pop back up in this chapter after his appearance last time, but I in no way expected to hear references to Kurogiri, Oboro, the Nomus, and Toga--all of that are the real surprises of this chapter, and with All Might seemingly in front of UA, it’s set up for more to come. I have repeatedly complained how Kurogiri and Oboro have been handled since the reveal back in Vigilantes that they are the same body, as I took it as using Aizawa’s back story for plot setup rather than offering anything meaningful to progress Aizawa’s character. I’m not taking back my complaints. But after this chapter, I am less frustrated with those choices made, and less impatient to see where that plot is going, all because of just a few bits of exposition in this chapter to re-contextualize prior scenes to make what wasn’t working work better. It’s not clear to me yet how and when exactly Aizawa advocated for Kurogiri and other Nomus to be transferred out of prison and into medical help--and that is an entire discussion about prison reform that I do not think I can speak to adequately, but I do need to identify. While I wish this chapter or previous chapters did more to show Aizawa’s advocacy, similar to how we saw him advocate to Nezu on behalf of the class he was expelling and re-enrolling, the exposition via brief dialogue between Aizawa and Nezu hit the right beats and ended this chapter on a more positive note. All of this moment felt earned and helped make something more out of Aizawa and Kurogir compared to how I thought their plot had been so far, merely re-shuffling the characters to suit where the plot goes next.

But speaking of where the plot goes next, the invocation of Toga and the safety parameters to deal with her potential impersonation of anyone entering UA strikes me as similar to Nezu explaining the safety measures at UA: you explain the safety protocols so that, when the Villains inevitably break them, we are shocked but understand how this happened. It’s like Ghostbusters: you have to say “don’t cross the streams” so that, when it happens, you know a rule has been broken and things are that desperate. Theoretically, based on the information UA has, if you keep Toga in isolation for so long, her impersonation will wear off: that makes sense. The problems are twofold. First, no, I still don’t trust that Nezu isn’t pulling something. But that’s a conspiracy theory, so I need harder evidence. Therefore, second, UA may not know how much Toga’s Quirk evolved in the fight against the MLA and may have evolved since the PLF fight; predicting the duration of her impersonating abilities, when paired with her ninja-like ability to hide her presence, means that Toga could pop up in UA in the near future. Having All Might somehow now in front of UA instead of having a chat with Stain leads me to think Toga could just as easily have impersonated All Might to get into UA and close to Izuku, but I’ll have to wait and see.

I also have avoided discussing Mineta in these recent chapters. At the time of his reunion with Izuku, I honestly did not read a queer subtext at all: his “I love you, man”-esque reaction to Izuku struck me as homosocial rather than queer. Now that he again has been prevented from getting close to Izuku in this chapter, I can’t avoid bringing it up now.

In the immediate time when the chapter came out, I noticed to distinct interpretations of his remarks to Izuku, based on what he says in Japanese and how Caleb Cook translated it into English: the homosocial as I just said, in terms of Mineta having always been prone to using language and passionate language to express his feelings, unfortunately almost always in a perverted way to girls and women; and the queer reading, that Mineta is indeed making a love confession to Izuku.

I’m not sure which side I find more persuasive, but the latter queer reading is effective, especially in retrospect seeing how often he is near Izuku in different chapters. And it recontextualizes his reaction to seeing Ochaco giving Izuku attention back in the Classes 1A vs 1B Arc: I thought he was jealous that Izuku was getting Ochaco’s affection, whereas it may be that he was jealous of anyone else showing affection to Izuku.

However, I could just as easily take a page out of Scrubs (yes, forgive me for citing a cringey show like Scrubs) when they tried to portray the Todd’s womanizing as part of a larger pansexual identity--which is also problematic, and really is not how I want to read Mineta as being bi or pan, because it again falls into the argument that being bi or pan means you’re hedonistic or horny all the time when, no, by themselves, the terms bi and pan just refer to your emotional and sexual attraction, not at all implying anything about your sex life. This is all the more infurating to have to explain when being a pervert is not tied explicitly to any one sexuality, gender, or sex, so to have it associated with being bi or pan is offensive. Granted, I also am offended by how popular culture associates being a man with immediately being associated with being a pervert, but that’s the fault of toxic masculinity and failure to recognize broader constructions of being a man and masculinity, but that’s another topic.

To summarize, I pause at any notion that Mineta’s characterization is anything beyond just a pervert to his girl and woman colleagues, or any notion whether he was just exaggerating his chauvinism and attraction to girls and women in order to cover up for being gay, bi, or pan, because either case has unfortunate implications. At best, this portrayal suggests is the victim of toxic heteronormativity--which, if that was the case, that doesn’t work because we just had to sit through his groping of Tsuyu, Momo, and others, and no, the story doesn’t get to excuse that bullshit behavior by saying he is young and influenced by the toxicity around him. At worst, this portrayal suggests that being bi or pan just means you are one big pervert and will grope anything that moves--and, again, no, that is not at all what being bi or pan is. That’s like saying “apples are red, therefore this red Stapler is an apple so I’m going to eat it.”

God, this is why I really wish Horikoshi would take the cue I’ve seen from more fanfic writers and just headcanon someone’s sexuality and making it apparent in the fiction: it’s not that hard to show someone’s attractive to someone else in ways that defy our heteornormative assumptions, it’s just that much harder to commit to it beyond some authorial-intent JK Rowling footnote. (And since I invoked her by name: fuck Rowling; trans rights now.)

But I want to wrap up this review on a positive note, even if that means I’m again invoking another cringey TV show. How I Met Your Mother (I warned you this would get cringey) built its symbolism around umbrellas. Having the umbrella scenes around Izuku in the rain, after this manga already invoked Kenji Miyazawa's “Be Not Defeated by the Rain,” coupled with Hawks’s narration--that is all really well-done. Umbrellas are that shield against the elements. It even ties back into Aizawa and Oboro: we first meet these two in Vigilantes when Aizawa couldn’t stand to bring a stray kitten out of the rain while Oboro, whose power is literally clouds, had no hesitation about shielding the cat. Shielding Izuku like this with the umbrellas as a metaphor for how the older man all the way back in Chapter 1 wants to shield Izuku, and how UA can shield Izuku, is a really good way of visualizing what is offered to Izuku. UA is not his home, but like an umbrella, this is a temporary fix against the elements awaiting out there. I’m not as convinced by Izuku saying he can bring things back to how they were before: that’s nonsense, because for society to progress, you can’t just go back to how things were, you have to take what worked and improve it and fix what was broken. I know Izuku knows this, especially after his talk with Nagant, but it is an awkward line for this chapter. But like how we’re dealing with COVID, like how we need to mask up just like we would hold an umbrella against the rain, just as we need to work together (even if, paradoxically, we do that by social distancing, not gathering in crowds like the UA people are), we need to get through this awfulness, and I appreciate that this series again communicates the value of collaboration and not persisting with the “I alone can fix this” approach All Might, for all his good intentions, unfortunately propped up that led to Shigaraki, this mess the characters now face--and, yeah, being political, is why we’re in this mess in a post-2016 atmosphere.

#my hero academia #mha spoilers #shota aizawa #minoru mineta #kurogiri #long post

[madrabbitsociety]

Just thinking about that post from earlier about how arts stuff shouldn’t have been turned into make money stuff. Because that mindset has killed so many hobbies for me, honestly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, maybe one day I’ll finally write something original and put it up on Smashwords or something, but probably not. 

A few years ago I had an audition for a dream job- don’t laugh, it was at a Renn Faire. I told my then-employer two months before the audition that I would be trying out for it and everything seemed perfectly normal. I gave him all the details and specs, and as I was a hairdresser working solely off commission I had some flexibility with my schedule. Well, the week of the audition I got a call from another theater company. It’s a community theater company, I’d auditioned for their production of Sherlock’s Veiled Secret and - the director stresses this to this day- VERY NARROWLY lost the role of Irene Adler, but their hairdresser dropped out and they needed help, would I come down? I had literally nothing on my books and walk-ins during the spring were scarce, so I asked my boss if I could leave a little early during tech week so I could be available during the show? I knew that if I proved I was willing to do other things, they’d work with me again.

He flipped the fuck out. 

Essentially his argument boiled down to ‘You can’t do hair and have other things in your life’. Which confused me, because he didn’t give married stylists or stylists with kids trouble when they wanted to leave early. It was only me- I had to be as dedicated to his salon as he was. I told him to fuck off. (OK, that’s a lie, I showed up to work one day, took down my license and left while he wasn’t there because I’m a fucking coward but what’re you gonna do?)

Sherlock happened the same weekend as the Ren Faire, and my car broke down, and I did something fucking stupid- I rented a vehicle. On a credit card. Because in my brain, if I missed the audition for the Faire I knew they wouldn’t see me next year (I know that when you first audition for a new company you rarely get cast, you gotta work your way in) and if I couldn’t help with Sherlock the same thing would probably happen with that company as well. 

See, here’s the thing, though. I didn’t drive until a few years ago and I was terrified of driving on highways- I wouldn’t even drive on highways near my house. And I was also terrified of giant vehicles- I had a tiny Ford Focus and I refused to drive my mom’s SUV. So here I was, shaking and screaming down 270 near DC to get to Annapolis and then to Rockville in Maryland (BIG stupid highway, in a RENTED SUV) all because I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to work for free with the theater. I had no money, I had no job, and I messed up my audition time so I didn’t get cast anyway although they still saw me, which I thought was really sweet of them. 

But that taught me a lot about what’s important to me as a person, I think. That weekend, on a hideously windy day, I got to perform the ‘What a piece of work is man’ speech from Hamlet on a replica of the Globe stage while all the stylists were still in the salon with that overbearing weirdo. And the next day, Sunday, when I showed up to do hair and run props for Sherlock’s Veiled Secret, I walked into a room full of absolute strangers and the director cried out, “Meghan’s here! We love Meghan!” 

When I said I wanted to volunteer my time, the first thing the salon manager and the salon owner asked was, “Why? Are they paying you? Why go there if they’re not paying you?” 

And over the last two years working with that company and those people, volunteering my time, I’ve built a really sweet connection. They know I’m miserable at my job, so they send me job opportunities in theater and other places as they pop up. They know I’m facing a tenuous living situation so every time they see a studio or a roommate situation closer to the theater that’s in my range, they forward me the listing. They send me Gritty memes when I had a relative pass away this week. And they were bugging me yesterday about auditioning for a virtual production of She Kills Monsters, which is why I’m on here trying to find a contemporary dramatic monologue because I can’t use ‘What a piece of work is man’. :-P  

It would be nice to earn money to write or to act. That’d be pretty fucking cool, I would never lie about that. But the things I get for volunteering my time, that’s a different kind of currency that’s much more important to me because it’s so scarce to find those type of loving connections in this world. I can’t WAIT to do ‘Shakespeare in the Wood’ this spring with my friends from A Taste for Murder- I’ll be playing Viola from Twelfth Night, and the sweet angel from my Pandemic Theater post is going to be my Olivia. And it’s really fricking cool. 

#There's more I could say about this #because it relates to my guardian angel only speaking in fandom terms #but i'd sound insane so #mad rabbit society personal stuff #be nice about my typos i live in a house with no heat no exaggeration

[repeating-sounds]

Always Wear Reflective Gear When Biking

There was this bike shop in Elesta, California. It had an off-white front with a big sign that said “Barry’s Bikes” in red lettering. You know, the old-fashioned kind of sign that might have shown up in the background of a polaroid you had in the attic. A few years back some kid had spray painted a mural on the side of the building. There were big spaceships in the foreground and the sky was purple. It looked cool so the owner of the shop, Big Tim, didn’t seem to care all that much.

There were always a few bikes out front. One of them was this cool copper color with white handles. It was a fixie, and had a slightly loose seat after years of wear. The chain was the same copper color as the frame.

The bike belonged to Eddie. Eddie was a tall guy, 6’2” with a big smile and a bigger frame. He worked full time at the bike shop, but after hours he was a man of the theater. He would spend his nights on the stage, though not in costume and with no lines to practice.

Eddie was a stage hand. He was the guy in all black pushing and pulling the set around the actors. But Eddie liked it, he was more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.  

For example, the actors were in the middle of a scene for their most recent production, “Al’s Business Cards”. He watched the talent run offstage as he pushed a makeshift staircase, he thought to himself I like this. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.

As practice came to a close, Eddie was happy. He’d be home in 20 minutes and he could make that parmesan crusted chicken he hadn’t made in a while. I think I have spinach at home, and some rice.

As Eddie strapped on his helmet and kicked the kickstand out, he saw Susan, an actress, walking to her car.

“Careful,” Eddie said, “some bad drivers out there.”

Eddie drove home at a good cruising speed, humming along as he thought about his meal.

Da dee, da dum, chicken in my tum, gotta eat some, da dee.

As he reached his place, a small house on the edge of town, he stopped for a moment to get his mail. He turned towards his home, admiring the mostly shingled roof and decent paint job. At that moment, a giant rock fell on his house.

About 20 feet tall, the rock wasn’t much of a rock at all. It let out a slight whirring and a panel opened up. Out of the panel stepped 10 giant creatures. They were humanoid with slightly purple skin and they stood at about 9 or 10 feet tall each.

Eddie dropped his mail. Fuck.

Lucky for Eddie, the aliens exited their ship facing away from him, and walked towards the center of town. As they walked they gathered up the townspeople, shooting indiscriminately at anyone who tried to run, or happened to be wearing a scarf.  The aliens hated scarves, so anyone interested in 2014 fall fashion suffered a much expected early grave.

The aliens forced the town together using a mixture of violence, electro-magnetic barricading, and psionic propaganda, which was the most horrific of all.

Attention humans, the voices said, We have come to teach you a vital lesson. You have commited your atrocities for long enough.

That doesn’t sound good.

Eddie followed the others. Whatever was in store for them, he would have to face as well--he wasn’t a hero, after all, only a stagehand.

Eddie laughed to himself, thinking back to the purple mural on the back wall. He thought of running, but it didn’t really seem like a good idea. What would I even do? I’m no hero, after all, only a stagehand.

The townsfolk, ten thousand strong, were corralled into the town center like a herd, half-dressed and wild-eyed. Some died, some wept, but the humans were very much a community, as they tend to be.

It is time to pay for your sins, said the foreign invaders, we are the IEAL: the intergalactic environmental action league. We are a watchdog group that stops planets from destroying themselves, like your species threatens to do now. Your production of traversing vehicles that consume gas and other resources has broken many codes. Regardless of your precontact designation, this has gone on too long. All with personal automated vehicles will be disposed of.

The aliens began firing, disintegrating many of the townspeople. A panic ensued.

Eddie ran--he wasn’t a hero-- back to his house. He scrambled past fleeing bodies and ashen remnants, until he got to his bike. There was no saving the house, but the bike he could try.

I have to leave. I have to do something.

An alien comes from nowhere, aiming his disentiger ray.

Prepare yourself, earthling..

Eddie recoiled, shoving the bike in front of himself.

“It’s my bike! I don’t drive, never needed to. Never owned a car of my own. Swear.”

The alien considered his options.

Very well. Leave, human, we have no quarrel with you.

Eddie ran for a while, then jumped on his bike and pedaled hard.

What am I going to do now?

He drove past the supermarket, past the theater. He drove past Barry’s Bikes. He drove past his life, watched it burning in front of his eyes.

The stagehand crossed through the town limits, into the wooded drive beyond. He needs to reach the next town in time, to warn them...he needs to…

Lights illuminated the road ahead. Two headlights passed over a small hill, the driver caught unaware.

Eddie’s tires skid. The car’s did too. The car was okay, but Eddie wasn’t.

Ow.

Eddie came to on the roadside, car smoking halfway through a tree off to the other side of the road.

Eddie inhaled painfully, his black shirt stained with blood. Eddie exhaled, looking at the sky above him. It looks purple, if you could believe it.

Eddie’s eyes closed, and he had one last thought…

Always Wear Reflective Gear When Biking.

#amwriting #story #shortstory #alien #biking #car #pollution

[180abroad]

Day 100: Welcome to York

Today, on our 100th day abroad, we finally went into town to start exploring York proper. It turned out to be a fun day filled with cobbled streets, chocolate, noodles, and football.

It was a sunny day with an almost cloudless pale-blue sky. As we entered the old town, we slipped into a stream of tourists making their way in as well. It was nice--enough people for the city to feel lively but not overwhelming.

We got a nice view of York Minster along the way. We would visit it another day, but for now we enjoyed gazing up at the soaring white-stone architecture. Our actual first stop was much more touristy: the York Chocolate Story.

The Chocolate Story was surprisingly fun and educational given the lukewarm reviews by Rick Steves and other travel guides. We were lead in a small group through a series of themed rooms, learning about the history of chocolate and its special connection to the city of York.

Standing in a hall made up to look like a Victorian street, our guide explained how it was only relatively recently that chocolate became a food. From its ancient Aztec origins, through its migration to early-modern Europe, and into the early 1800s, “chocolate” was a brewed beverage like coffee or tea.

It was only in the mid-1800s that an English Quaker named Joseph Fry discovered the secret to making “edible chocolate”--a novelty that took the continent by storm. In York, several entrepreneurial Quaker families developed their own chocolate empires, including Terry’s--of Chocolate Orange fame--and Rowntree’s--inventor of the Kit-Kat.

We got to taste a recreation of the original Rowntree’s chocolate bar recipe. There were bits of crushed cocoa nibs mixed into the chocolate, giving it a lumpy texture, and I don’t think any of us expected it to taste particularly great. But it was actually really good--dark but not bitter, and the nibs added a complex, roasted flavor. Not the best chocolate I’ve ever had, but almost certainly in the top half. It seems like the most important parts of chocolatiering were nailed down almost immediately, and everything since then has just been a matter of tweaking.

Next, we sat through a planetarium-style presentation on the Aztec roots of chocolate, including a sample of drinking chocolate prepared in the Aztec fashion: cold, spicy, and bitter.

After going through a couple more rooms dedicated to the various chocolate families of York--and more chocolate samples--we went downstairs to the chocolate “factory.”

As we took a crash course on the stages of chocolate production, we got to taste some cocoa nibs as well as some unsweetened 100% dark chocolate. The nibs were bitter but not bad. The unsweetened chocolate--which is just nibs that have been heated and compressed--was abominable. It was somehow horribly bitter and disgustingly bland at the same time, and the taste stuck to the inside of my mouth for minutes afterward. Jessica kind of liked it.

According to our guide, it’s actually quite hard to find 100% dark chocolate in stores. Only a small percentage of people like it, and chocolate companies just don’t think it’s worth the cost to make and distribute it.

A few years ago my dad found an image of a “Scotch wheel” showing all the flavor profiles of Scotch whisky. Jessica isn’t a big fan of Scotch (yet), but we finally found a wheel that we can all appreciate. The guides are also chocolatiers, so Jessica got to ask some advanced questions and generally talk shop with him while we waited for the last section of the visit to be ready.

The guided part of our tour finally over, it was time for us to make our own “chocolate lollies.” The chocolate of the day was Belgian white. Neither of us are big fans of white chocolate, but our guide insisted that we give it a try. Even people who don’t like white chocolate usually like Belgian white chocolate, he said. And he was right: it was really, really good. We each picked out a colored stick, then after he poured a circle of chocolate over one end, we got to sprinkle our choice of four toppings over it.

While we waited for our lollies to harden, we got to watch one of the other chocolatiers make a batch of chocolate truffles with a mango-cream filling. It was quite interesting, and Jessica was vindicated to learn that he too didn’t like eating chocolate despite loving to make it. (Though to be fair, Jessica does enjoy the occasional chocolate, while this guy gets violently ill from it.) We were a fairly small group, so we had to eat several truffles each. I mean, it would have been rude not to...

Our tickets to the Chocolate Story included a complimentary scoop of ice cream from the bar downstairs, but we decided to save it for later. For now, we had a date with some glass cats.

When we arrived at our flat, our host had left us a note telling us to come by the York Glass Shop for a free gift when we had time. We weren’t sure what to expect, but having enjoyed our visit to a glass shop in Bath, we were tantalized by the prospect of a running theme.

Our free gift was one of their glass cats, which came in black as well as birthstone colors. It was Jessica's turn to get a glass cat, so she picked out an aquamarine one. We also got some stained-glass bookmarks as presents for our moms.

With our glass gifts in hand, we walked around the rest of the Shambles, York's preserved medieval merchant street lined with tweed fashion boutiques, cheesy Viking stores, and everything in between.

For our first lunch out in this medieval city known for Vikings, roasts, and fried dough, we went to Wagamama, an Anglo-Japanese fusion chain. We had heard about it before, but we didn't actually know what it was. We enjoyed some yaki-soba, yaki-udon, and a plate of pulled pork gyoza. We laughed at the thought that this was probably meant to be exotic, but to us Californians it was practically a taste of home.

Our last big stop of the day was Clifford's Tower, the partially ruined stone keep that is all that remains of the old York Castle. If the Tower doesn't look quite like a typical English castle to you, you'd be right. It's design was inspired by French castles of the time. The chief architect is believed to be the Frenchman Henry de Reyns, who was also responsible for designing much of Westminster Abbey.

There wasn't a lot to see, but the view from the top was great.

In the lot below, a pop-up Shakespearean theater was being assembled. We checked, and unfortunately the first show was the day after we'd be leaving York.

Perhaps the most interesting story the castle had to tell--and certainly the most chilling--was about a pogrom that took place in 1190, when the castle was still made of wood. Anti-Semitism was erupting throughout the country in the wake of Richard the Lionheart's coronation and the start of the Third Crusade. When one such riot began in York, the entire Jewish community--around 150 men, women, and children--took refuge in the keep.

A bloodthirsty mob--including knights and commoners alike--assaulted the castle to try and drag them out. Rather than renounce their faith or allow themselves be torn apart by the mob, the people inside chose a third option. Before the last men took their own lives, they set the keep ablaze, turning it into a funeral pyre that would burn their remains before they could be desecrated by the rioters outside. There were no survivors.

Feeling it was high time for some more spirit-lifting chocolate, we headed back to the Shambles to claim our free ice cream and some hot cocoa.

Finally, we circled back to the Minster, where we saw a conspicuously lackadaisical statue of Emperor Constantine. York is unusual in that it was originally founded as a Roman military base--there was no preexisting local settlement in the area. Constantine was actually declared emperor in York, and the Minster was later built on the foundations of his military headquarters. Near the statue stands an ancient Roman pillar unearthed from the Minster’s foundations during a 20th-century retrofit.

Satisfied with everything we'd done that day, we headed home to watch the Poland vs. Senegal game of the World Cup. Poland played valiantly and scored two goals to Senegal’s one. Unfortunately, one of those two was an own goal, so Senegal took the win.

Next Post: York

Last Post: To York (Relax, Restock, and Reassess)

#180abroad #york #england #britain #castles #chocolate

[blackkudos]

Phylicia Rashad

Phylicia Rashad or Rashād /ˈfɪliːʃəˈrɑːʃəd/ (born June 19, 1948) is an American actress, singer and stage director. She is known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the long-running NBC sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–92), which earned her Emmy Award nominations in 1985 and 1986. She was dubbed "The Mother" of the African-American community at the 2010 NAACP Image Awards.

In 2004, Rashad became the first black actress to win the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, which she won for her role in the revival of A Raisin in the Sun. Her other Broadway credits include Into the Woods (1988), Jelly's Last Jam (1993), Gem of the Ocean (2004), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2008). She won a NAACP Image Award when she reprised her A Raisin in the Sun role in the 2008 television adaptation. She has also appeared in the films For Colored Girls (2010), Good Deeds (2012), and Creed (2015).

Early life

Rashad was born Phylicia Ayers-Allen in Houston, Texas. Her mother, Vivian Ayers, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated artist, poet, playwright, scholar, and publisher. Phylicia's father, Andrew Arthur Allen, (d. 1984), was an orthodontist. Rashad's siblings are jazz-musician brother Tex (Andrew Arthur Allen, Jr., born 1945), sister Debbie Allen (born 1950), an actress, choreographer, and director, and brother Hugh Allen (a real estate banker in North Carolina). While Rashad was growing up, her family moved to Mexico, and as a result, Rashad speaks Spanish fluently.

Rashad studied at Howard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1970 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She was initiated into the Alpha Chapter during her tenure at Howard University.

Theatre

Rashad first became known for her stage work with a string of Broadway credits, including Deena Jones in Dreamgirls (she was Sheryl Lee Ralph's understudy until leaving the show in 1982 after being passed over as Ralph's full-time replacement) and playing a Munchkin in The Wiz for three and a half years. In 1978, she released the album Josephine Superstar, a disco Concept album telling the life story of Josephine Baker. The album was mainly written and produced by Jacques Morali and Rashad's second husband Victor Willis, original lead singer and lyricist of the Village People. She met Willis while they were both cast in The Wiz.

Other Broadway credits include August: Osage County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Gem of the Ocean, Raisin in the Sun (2004 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play/Drama Desk Award), Blue, Jelly's Last Jam, Into the Woods, and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. Off-Broadway credits include Lincoln Center’s productions of Cymbeline and Bernarda Alba; Helen, The Story and Everybody's Ruby at the Public Theater; The Negro Ensemble Company productions of Puppet Play, Zooman and the Sign, Sons and Fathers of Sons, In an Upstate Motel, Weep Not For Me, and The Great Mac Daddy; Lincoln Center's production of Ed Bullins' The Duplex; and The Sirens at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In regional theatre, she performed as Euripides' Medea and in Blues for an Alabama Sky at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. Other regional theatres at which she has performed are the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. and the Huntington Theatre in Boston.

Rashad was the first black actress of any nationality to win the Best Actress (Play) Tony Award, which she won for her 2004 performance as Lena Younger in a revival of the play A Raisin in the Sun by playwright Lorraine Hansberry. She was nominated for the same award the following year, for Gem of the Ocean. Several Black women have won in the Best Actress (Musical) category, including the late Virginia Capers, who won in 1973 for her portrayal of Lena in the musical adaptation of Hansberry's play, entitled Raisin. Rashad also won the 2004 Drama Desk award for Best Actress in a Play for A Raisin in the Sun by tying (split award) with Viola Davis for the play Intimate Apparel.

In 2007, Rashad made her directorial debut with the Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. More recently, in early 2014 Rashad directed a revival of Fences, also by Wilson, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, which ran to generally positive reviews, and continued an ongoing focus on Wilson's work, including a well-received production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom that she directed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in late 2016.

In 2008, Rashad starred on Broadway as Big Mama in an all African-American production of Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof directed by her sister Debbie Allen. She appeared alongside stage veterans James Earl Jones (Big Daddy) and Anika Noni Rose (Maggie), as well as film actor Terence Howard, who made his Broadway debut as Brick. In 2009, she appeared as Violet Weston, the drug-addicted matriarch of Tracy Lett's award-winning play August: Osage County at the Music Box Theatre.

From March 17 to May 1, 2016, Rashad played the lead role of Shelah in Tarell Alvin McCraney's play Head of Passes at The Public Theater. Her performance was positively reviewed.

Film and television

Rashad received a career boost when she joined the cast of the ABC soap opera One Life to Live to play publicist Courtney Wright in 1983. She is best known for the role of attorney Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show. The show, which ran from 1984 to 1992, starred Bill Cosby as obstetrician Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable, and focused on their life with their five children. In 1985, Rashad co-hosted the NBC telecast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with Pat Sajak and Bert Convy.

When Cosby returned to TV comedy in 1996 with CBS's Cosby, he called on Rashad to play Ruth Lucas, his character's wife. The pilot episode had been shot with Telma Hopkins, but Cosby then fired the executive producer and replaced Hopkins with Rashad. The sitcom ran from 1996 to 2000. That year, Cosby asked Rashad to work on his animated television series Little Bill, in which the actress voiced Bill's mother, Brenda, until the show's end in 2004. She also played a role in the pre-show of the Dinosaur ride at Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom theme park as Dr. Helen Marsh, the head of the Dino Institute.

Rashad played "Kill Moves" wealthy mother on Everybody Hates Chris on December 9, 2007. In 2007 she appeared as Winnie Guster in the Psych episode Gus's Dad May Have Killed an Old Guy. She returned to the role in 2008, in the episode Christmas Joy.

In February 2008, Rashad portrayed Lena Younger in the television film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. Starring core members of the cast of the 2004 Broadway revival at the Royale Theatre of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, including Audra McDonald as Ruth Younger, and Sean Combs as Walter Lee Younger. The television film adaption debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast by ABC on February 25, 2008. According to Nielsen Media Research, the program was watched by 12.7 million viewers and ranked #9 in the ratings for the week ending March 2, 2008.

In November 2010, Rashad featured as Gilda in the ensemble cast in the Tyler Perry film For Colored Girls, based on the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. Rashad explained in an interview with Vibe Movies & TV in 2010, that "I saw the original Broadway play. I thought it was amazing how such a story that wasn’t pretty was poetry. Usually poetry is about lofty things and this was the poetry of speech and the movement of everyday people. I found a little bit of it off-putting to tell you the truth, because it was so angry when I saw it. And I think Tyler Perry has added an element here that wasn't in the original stage production, and that is the necessity for taking responsibility for one's own self otherwise you are just living to die. That is where he wrote the line [in the film], "You gotta take some responsibility in this. Otherwise you are just living to die".

In 2012, she starred in another Tyler Perry movie Good Deeds. Also in 2012, Rashad played Clairee Belcher in the remake of Steel Magnolias (the role originated by Olympia Dukakis). This version has an all African American A-list cast, including Queen Latifah as M'Lynn, Jill Scott as Truvy, Condola Rashād as Shelby, Adepero Oduye as Annelle, and Alfre Woodard as Ouiser.

In 2016, Rashad was cast as a recurring guest star in the role of Diana DuBois in the third season of the Lee Daniels-produced Empire television series on Fox.

In 2017, Rashad portrayed Bishop Yvette A. Flunder, pastor of The City of Refuge Church in San Francisco, CA, as past of the Dustin Lance Black mini-series When We Rise. Her appearance in show highlighted the compassion of the church, the commitment of its leadership and the loving home the church provides to minister in the tough, primarily African-American community in San Francisco.

Personal life

Rashad's first marriage, in 1972, was to dentist William Lancelot Bowles, Jr. They had one son, William Lancelot Bowles III, who was born the following year. The marriage ended in 1975. Rashad then married Victor Willis (original lead singer of the Village People, whom she met during the run of The Wiz) in 1978. Their divorce was finalized in 1982.

She married former NFL wide receiver and sportscaster Ahmad Rashād on December 14, 1985. It was a third marriage for both of them and she took his last name. They were married after he proposed to her during a pregame show for a nationally televised Thanksgiving Day football game between the New York Jets and the Detroit Lions on November 28, 1985. Their daughter, Condola Phyleia Rashād, was born on December 11, 1986 in New York. The couple divorced in early 2001.

Awards and honors

2003: Honored as Woman of the Year by the Harvard Black Men's Forum

2005: received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts (D.F.A.) degree from Brown University

2011: received an honorary doctorate degree from Spelman College for her work in the Arts

2011: named the first Denzel Washington Chair professor in Theatre at Fordham University, supported by a $2 million gift from the actor

Wikipedia

#Phylicia Rashad #06-19

[duallygirl178]

Dearest O'Malley chapter 9

Chapter 9

Every time Natalie was talking about moving in with Nathan, she put in a lot of thought to attract the energy into making it come true. I hoped she would move in with Nathan because it would make us both happy. Then one day, she showed me pictures on file from her laptop. Natalie had a ton of pictures on her laptop. When the photos got to the letter "L", I spotted a white 2 door Lincoln parked in the driveway in the background of a neighborhood in which she used to live in 16 years ago before she moved to Durango. I realized there was something mighty familiar about that car...but where? I studied the photo really closely as I zoomed in on the image and I realized, it was Gonzo. After 20 years apart, I hadn't seen him since Impa went missing. There was more for me to know and I wondered if she knew Impa, my friend that went missing. As I viewed more of her pictures, I found the answer to my questions. She had images of Impa and what I saw, disturbed me. Impa sat dead in a pile of weeds with the motor still intact, but the fluids all gone. Footages of what was left of him gave me nightmares. There was stuff in the trunk that wasn't there before and the windows were missing. The seats inside were ruined. Impa's dead body in the photo was just there rotting in the weeds. I had a moment of silence for my friend, Impa. Natalie told me who owned te farm and there was a guy was a local was in really bad debt before his divorce. He cheated people that bought cars at a dealership and was caught. He had to pack up and leave town with three kids, abandoning his ranch and home behind. There was only 5 horses and a mule that were out in the field by themselves. She shared some horse pictures that I got to see. Natalie would visit, do homework from college class, and relax with the horses. The horses weren't starving or anything because they had grass to eat and water to drink. They were just fine. I had a lot of memories of Gonzo and Impa together hanging out with me. I remembered the weekends, the things we'd do and I remembered all the jokes Impa told us when we were sad or bored our of our hoods...all for once last time.

I was still thankful that I had Gonzo and Robin as friends. Although, Gonzo had never met Robin before and by looking at Natalie, felt sympathy for me on my loss. I admired her feelings and I could see that she had a heart for my friend. I was glad she got a picture of Impa so I could see and feel better about what happened to him. A little later on our way to get drinks, Natalie was telling us all that she would feel happier living with Nathan since she had enough of Durango and all the things that were going on like the time she quit a program she was sick of called "Community Connections" because her caretaker kept walking in her apartment without knocking and another example the transit changed her bus stop. I personally believed she would be much better if she moved back down and with Nathan so he wouldn't have to waste gallons of gasoline going to Durango. I had a prediction she would and maybe later in 2018.

Later that day while I was at the drive in at Taco Bell, I happened to pull up to an old two door Lincoln that was white. He looked into the rear view mirror and seemed to recognize me. He asked if it was me and I replied it was recognizing him almost right away. It was Gonzo. He and I talked while we waited for our order and the line was long enough for us to catch up on all the things that we were doing these days. It was great to see him and he asked me about Impa...if I ever saw him after he disappeared. I told him exactly what happened to Impa and about Natalie having those pictures. Gonzo couldn't believe it either and he felt sympathy for poor Impa. He was heartbroken to hear it. Gonzo asked me how I've been holding up and I replied that I was handling it in a not so good but I'd pull through.Then, that's when I knew, I had to ask the same. Gonzo told me he would need some time to cope with his feelings. Impa was a good friend to both of us. We now swapped addresses so we could write to each other or even visit when we wanted to hang out. Interestingly enough, Gonzo lived in the same neighborhood as Natalie's mother and it was only a few houses down. Gonzo's order was up and so we both said our see-you-later words and then He zoomed off.

Later that day, I ran into Robin (Mister Rockin' Robin Finns, as I like to call him) while I was on my way to Safeway and got caught in another conversation with him. I told him that I found out that I lost a close friend a long time ago since he lost his sister recently. It all happened in Taos in a tragic semi accident. I was telling it how I remembered it. Knowing Robin, it kind of over-sympathetic and cried so much that he wanted to hear more. He wasn't exactly a cowardly red engine either and it was difficult to scare him, but I got him interested this time. His cowardly grille took me back in time 1985. It was just after watching "John Carpender's Christine" at the drive thru for the fourth time. But when that time when "Beetle juice" came to theaters, he totally moistened himself just as bad as "Creature" or even "Zombie Lake" or "Biohazard". Gonzo was all shook up that it was Impa's idea to go out in the woods to smoke reefer to calm down. Gonzo was so scared that he actually turned pink. He looked like Barbie's pink Lincoln from an Elvis Persley movie production. But Robin was so distraught that he gave me his deep sympathy and he remembered watching "Biohazard" for the sixth time and it didn't get any better for him on how scary it was. He asked me if I ever needed anything like a talk about to make me feel better, just to go to see him.

When I finished telling him about the death of Impa, Robin bawled for an hour as he tried to get a hold of himself. When he did, he apologized for acting embarrassingly cathartic. Robin was over-sentimental that he took things too far. He's what I described as having actor's syndrome. Someone with too much emotion that needed to be put at work on a set. I almost fell asleep listening to Robin go on and on in a conversation. It was almost getting late. Finally, Robin was done talking to me and thankfully he needed to get home too. We simply said a short good-bye and we both needed to get home.

By the time I got home, it was already an hour passed 10 PM. I was tired from Robin wasting my time by talking for so long. Once that I was let in, I had a seat on the couch and dozed off. The very next morning, I wrestled Ol' Reliable to get a move on so Nathan could test drive him around the block, I had to tell him I spent most of the month taking Jan, Nathan, and Natalie to town every night and that it was his turn to be driven. That seemed to put a lid on it! So without any guff, fuss, or cuss, Ol' Reliable obeyed me. I was still the leader and as long as I was on the property, I had control.

When Ol' Reliable got home shortly around the block, I got a chance to read Randy's old books. The time was already 5:23 PM and Jan just got home from work. In about 30 minutes, she would be ready to get drinks and go do errands. Tonight was about Ol' Reliable and it was his turn to take the three to town. And as for me, I got to 5 of Randy's books that he kept in the bathroom. I really enjoyed the fantasy world of quests and knights as I stayed home to relax. It was quiet enough by the time I finished all of the books, I turned on the TV to the VELOCITY channel and I watched some TV. It was a nice evening that night and having a break from town has never looked this good.

[historichollywoodphotographs]

The Hollywood Bowl: Where Angelinos Celebrate Summer

It is summer in Hollywood. Except it is not. Most entertainment venues are closed. Movie theaters sit empty. There are few tourists ogling the Walk of Fame and the newly created Black Lives Matter street mural on Hollywood Boulevard. Musso and Frank’s has launched take out service. Masks are no longer just for superhero characters busking in the courtyard of the Chinese Theatre. Social distancing is the current norm.

The strange sense of “life suspended” is felt most deeply by the cancellation of the Hollywood Bowl season. The venue has not been dark during its summer season in more than 98 years; the official centennial will be marked in 2022 (something to look forward to). The Bowl IS summer in Hollywood: every style of music on the planet, picnics, fireworks, graduations, and dates under the stars. My mood lifts the minute I enter its gates, and I know I’m not alone. Music-filled air in an outdoor amphitheater in the wooded Cahuenga Pass with a (sometime) view of the Hollywood Sign. It just does not get much better.

What better time to pause and reflect on just what a community achievement the Bowl has been. Over 100 years ago, the Hollywood community was just beginning to create a vision of what it wanted to be: a place known for the visual and performing arts worldwide. Outdoor venues played a role from the start. At the turn of the century, Paul de Longpres’ gallery and gardens set the tone for art in Hollywood. Creators of a relatively new art form called “motion pictures” chose Hollywood as their base. Legitimate theater productions and opulent religiously themed pageants were developed; the casts were often actors from the New York stage transplanted to the West Coast to work in the movies. Hollywood formed a chorale and a local orchestra. By the end of World War I, Hollywood had been a part of the City of Los Angeles for less than a decade. Its population of affluent, educated transplants from the Midwest and East Coast needed to be entertained. Music was key.

In 1918, a patron of the arts from Philadelphia, Christine Wetherill Stevenson, came to Southern California to produce performances of Light of Asia, written by Sir Edwin Arnold and adapted by Hollywood resident, Georgina Wharton Jones. Stevenson, an ardent member of the Theosophical Society, whose local chapter was headquartered on Krotona Hill in Hollywood, demonstrated with the production that theatrical performances outdoors were feasible and valued. In collaboration with local leaders, including poet and songwriter Carrie Jacobs Bond, director DW Griffith, developer CE Toberman, Marie Rankin Clarke and a host of others, she formed the Theater Arts Alliance and began searching for a location with superior acoustics. In the canyon just north of the Hollywood Hotel, Toberman found parcels owned by Myra Hershey, the hotel’s proprietor, and several others which fit the bill. More than 50 acres were assembled; the funds came from Mrs. Stevenson and Mrs. Clarke on behalf of the Alliance. Differences of opinion soon arose about the use of the venue, originally known as Daisy Dell.  

Mrs. Stevenson wanted the site for Theosophical events while most others wanted it used for musical purposes. By 1920, Mrs. Stevenson became disenchanted with the concept, the perceived slowness of fundraising, and left the project. The Arts Alliance was dissolved and replaced by the Community Park and Art Association, consisting of many of the same players. They were joined by community and music leaders FW Blanchard, William Merritt Garland, Harry Chandler, George Eastman, architect Frank Meline, and pianist Artie Mason Carter. Carter, a “good mixer and organizer” according to EO Palmer, took the lead, organizing an Easter Sunrise service in 1921 and began “Symphonies Under the Stars” with world renowned musicians which quickly drew audiences of 15,000 by 1925. The first stage elements built in 1922-23 were rudimentary, but the offerings were diverse. Local Native Americans continued to use the site for various events. Prices started at 25 cents.

The 60 acres of land was transferred to the County of Los Angeles in 1924, forming a partnership which allowed Allied Architects to put in more permanent seating and stage infrastructure. Bench seating, box seats, and various configurations of the stage evolved through the years. Capacity was increased, but degraded the acoustics, a problem that recurred well into this century. Architect Lloyd Wright designed a pyramidal shell from lumber originally used in the sets of Robin Hood in 1927. That lasted only a year, so Wright followed up with an arched shape of concentric rings the next year, variations of which became the norm for future designs as the shells were replaced in 1929 and again in 2003. A reflecting pool graced the front of the stage from 1953-1972. At the entrance on Highland Avenue stands the monumental Muse Fountain by George Stanley. Picnic and parking areas, a museum and restaurants are also tucked into the wooded site.

Featured in A Star is Born (1937), Double Indemnity (1944), Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny cartoons, not to mention countless other TV and films, right up to today’s NBC family drama This is Us, the location is a star in its own right. It quickly became a goal of every major performer in classical, jazz, rock, punk, rap and international music to play the Bowl. Beginning with performances by violinist Jascha Heifitz, jazz great Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and Marian Anderson, the Bowl gained worldwide renown by the 1950s. A financial crisis closed the venue for two weeks in 1951 while the Board regrouped with new leaders including Dorothy Buffum Chandler. 

The parade of luminaries soon continued with Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Van Cliburn, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. The ‘60s saw rock ‘n roll added to the classical musical lineup of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, featuring tunes by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. Subsequent decades also hosted Santana, the Grateful Dead, The Eagles, Elton John, as well as YoYo Ma, Pavarotti, John Williams, Baryshnikov, Willie Nelson, the Dixie Chicks, and Lady Gaga with Tony Bennett. Broadway musicals were adapted; movies projected on huge screens brought the medium full circle. “The talent onstage has changed, but the audience relationship with the Bowl has remained constant—one year stretching into the next, until the parade of time can be marked by shared moments in this place,” wrote one LA Times writer earlier this year.

We look forward to the time when the canyon will once again echo with music, when fireworks and performances awe, and friends gather over picnics and wine in this unrivaled cultural facility. In the meantime, a trip through our photo collection of the Bowl will have to tide you over, along with the virtual presentations planned by Gustavo Dudamel on KCET/PBS starting August 19th. Six episodes composed of past performances will constitute “the 2020 season.” And you better believe, it ends with fireworks.

~ Christy McAvoy, Historic Hollywood Photographs

Sources: Bruce Torrence archives; EO Palmer; The LA Times; In Concert at the Hollywood Bowl website

#historic hollywood photographs #hollywood #hollywood bowl #concert venues #music #amphitheaters #cahuenga pass #highland avenue #history

[matinee-after-5]

Well, the idea was there

A feature film, according to the Academy of motion Pictures Arts and Science (AKA, The Academy) is a movie over 40 minutes long, at least to be considered for the Oscars. This film, tho fulfilling this requirement, does not, in any way, shape, or form, qualify for any prize, not even a Razzie.

I watched The Brain Eaters, a 1958 independent scifi-horror piece, secretly coproduced by Roger Corman. Clocking in at 61 minutes, it’s one piece of old timey black and white schlock that’s easy to watch, and doesn’t last long enough to bore you, and just intriguing enough to get you wondering what’s going on. 

Something strange is happening in Riverdale. Do, not that Riverdale. Tho there is a blonde and a dark haired girl involved. As a couple drive, there’s a crash (maybe?) and as they investigate the woods (as you do) they find dead animals, and... A CONE.

Apparently deciding that it’s a possible commie plot, a tough talking senator is dispatched to deal with the situation, and oddly enough, he may be the most level-headed character of the lot. A possible relative to J Jonah Jameson, he demands action, and the only reason that he doesn’t slam his fist down, is that he has no desk to do so, possibly be due to budget cuts.

What shots took place on “location” were cars driving. Mostly likely, they were patched up clips that happened to be available, with the right kind of car. Day time or night time was unimportant, as the action of driving is the important bit. So the fact that the car is shown driving down the winding curve in daytime, followed by the couple driving having a conversation in darkness is irrelevant. Or maybe symbolic, but the movie is not that clever.

A great trope of old sci-fi is to had a scientist, always titled as a “professor” being the man of thought, smoking a pipe (and having done some pipe smoking, you need thought and patience for the process to work) and being knowledgeable about things; white coat optional. Indeed, this professor scientist eschews the lab coat for a smart coverall, which is necessary, because he’s a man of action science. And nothing speaks more to action science than packing a gun to science investigation.

The hallmark of independent film making is low (in this case damn low) budgets, and the crew does it’s best to get around that limitation. There’s very limited special effects, or indeed props. They try and exploit the basic premise with the best means at their disposal, which may be the refuse bins outside a rival studio. Or whatever they could scrounge up at the thrift store.

The acting is a step up from an Ed Wood film, but not reaching the melodrama of a James Wales production; think community theater and c-list actors, minus name recognition. Not bad per se, but nothing exceptional.

The biggest flaw with the movie, besides a haphazard execution, is the script. The idea, the basic premise is not bad in and of itself; but they could have spent a bit more time tightening up the story to patch in some gaps (it takes far too long to identify the seemingly random cop as being the sheriff) but while another movie might had tossed in a bunch of scenes with the characters, or random players, directly unrelated to the plot to build character and backstory, this production sticks to the plot, and keeps things as tight as possible regarding the pacing.

Another positive about the movie is that the women are not the hapless victims, or damsels in distress, they are active, if limited participants. And compared to later sci-fi action films, there’s a refreshing lack of machismo; indeed, the fight scene could have been taken from a Star Trek OS episode, with grappling and two-fisted hammer blows straight out of professional wrestling, and pistol shooting haphazardly from the hip like some cowboy bit player.

I saw hints of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as well as Night of the Living Dead, which is nice, and I think that the screenplay could well be easily adapted as a Twilight Zone/Outer Limits episode on it’s premise, which would have made better use of whatever budget they had.

Bonus Easter egg: the Bunsen burner in the lab was most likely used to make coffee, which is certainly a very science nerd thing to do.

[saraseo]

[newyorktheater]

part of a hand washing poster from the New York City Department of Health

As local news of the spread of the coronavirus grows more alarming (with Governor Cuomo having declared a state of emergency in New York over the weekend), the theater community has been responding seriously, but also theatrically.

Much of the theatrical response, official and otherwise, has to do with….cleaning. The Broadway League updated its statement on its website:

“….all productions continue to play as scheduled. We have significantly increased the frequency of cleaning and disinfecting in all public and backstage areas beyond the standard daily schedule, and we have added alcohol-based sanitizer dispensers for public use in the lobby of every theatre. We invite patrons to make use of soap, paper towels, and tissues available in all restrooms.”

As a preventive measure against disease in general, the Centers for Disease Control long has recommended washing your hands, and has suggested singing Happy Birthday twice, to make sure your hand washing lasts 20 seconds. The Charles R. Wood Theater in Glen Falls, N.Y. has a better idea:

A theatrical duo called Fossilheads modified a step-by-step World Health Organization illustration about hand washing with Lady Macbeth’s monologue about the same activity (albeit in a different context) to drive it home among theater fans:

This is the flyer posted in the lobby of every theater I’ve attended this past week, from Broadway to Off-Off Broadway, issued by the NYC Department of Health, which offers a useful coronavirus page. The poster was often not far from the newly ubiquitous hand sanitizer

“…I’m certain that theatre will survive whatever happens,” declares critic Lyn Gardner in The Stage of the UK> “Theatre has survived the plague in 1606…the uncertainties following both 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash and also several heightened alerts around terrorism.” Yes, theaters were shut down in 1606. “The closure of theatres in 1606 eventually ushered in a new era with the creation of the indoor playhouse. It is possible the Covid-19 virus may play a similar role in shaping the theatre of the future.”

How Theaters Can Prepare for Coronavirus: A TCG Webinar

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) — This page created by the Centers for Disease Control is the most reliable source of health information about the virus

  The Week in New York Theater Reviews

I Am Nobody

A man in a hazmat suit came on stage, to give us the usual spiel about the location of the exits and turning off our cell phones, and I thought: Ok, yes, the governor has declared a state of emergency in New York, but isn’t this carrying coronavirus precautions a bit too far? As it turns out, though, this box office manager making the announcements was being playful, wearing one of the costumes from ‘I Am Nobody,’ the latest quirky musical by Greg Kotis, who won two Tonys twenty years ago as the book writer and lyricist of “Urinetown,” the satirical musical about a future dystopian society in which citizens had to pay to pee. “I Am Nobody,” for which Kotis wrote the music as well as the words, takes place in a different dystopian society – our own, with its “supernatural contraptions” and social media and smart phones and the Internet.

Girl From The North Country

Girl from the North Country” is largely the same slow, sad, elliptical and occasionally exquisite theater piece I saw Off-Broadway. But my reaction to it has changed, for better and for worse. There are still a good number of tuneful melodies sung gloriously by an exceptional 17-member cast accompanied by fiddle and piano, and I appreciated new aspects of the show. But 150 minutes of dreary lives didn’t wear as well this time around.

Aaron Yoo

The Headlands

The first of the many surprises in “The Headlands,” the latest, cleverly crafted play in New York by trickster San Francisco playwright Christopher Chen, comes after Henry (Aaron Yoo) introduces himself to us as a Google engineer, a film noir buff, and an “amateur sleuth” who’s been looking into the unsolved murder of one George Wong, a kitchen contractor….”Oh, I’m [his] son.Sorry for not telling you earlier…”

Anatomy of a Suicide

It’s been a battering couple of weeks, what with abandonment, abduction, desperation, murder, genocide, and pandemic – all but the last one happening on New York stages…. “Anatomy of a Suicide,” is without question an exercise in virtuosity for both playwright Alice Birch and director Lileana Blain-Cruz, with a cast that deserves kudos. But it was a show that made me wonder whether I needed a break from theatergoing.

Bob Avian, Hal Prince and Michael Bennett watching a rehearsal in Boston of “Company”

Book: Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey a fun and easy read that offers a light, slight overview of the six-decade career of an accomplished and well-connected theater artist…If much of “Dancing Man” is of the “And then we worked on this,” it can’t help but offer a large, sweet slice of theater history. At the age of 82, Avian, the NYC-born son of working class Armenian immigrants, is old enough to have seen the original production of “Oklahoma!” – his first musical on Broadway. He was eight years old at the time…and largely unimpressed:

The Week in New York Theater News

Digital lotteries and rush:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf $39 tickets

Lehman Trilogy $40

Company: Standing room for $32

Mrs. Doubtfire: Digital rush tickets on TodayTix for $35.

Plaza Suite: Digital lottery on TodayTix for $39

  The 65th annual Drama Desk Award has a newly designed statuette. Nominations will be announced April 21, and the ceremony will be held on May 31 at Town Hall.

Michael Urie will reprise his role in Jonathan Tolins’ Buyer & Cellar for two performances at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater April 10–11

Qui Nguyen

MTC’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” at City Center May 12 to June 28, will feature Samantha Quan and Paco Tolson, who both appeared in the MTC 2016 production of Nguyen’s “Vietgone,” in a cast that also includes Tim Chiou, Maureen Sebastian and Eugene Young. Told from a mother’s perspective, the play is the story of a young family’s attempt to put down roots in Arkansas, a place as different from Vietnam as it gets.

“Once Upon A One More Time,” the Broadway-aiming musical using the music of Britney Spears, will perform at Chicago’s James M. Nederlander Theater this spring with a cast that includes Justin Guarini as Prince Charming and Briga Heelan as Cinderella, along with Simon Callow as the narrator, Emily Skinner as the stepmother, and Aisha Jackson as Snow White.

Clubbed Thumbs Summerworks Festival at The Wild Project, May 15 – July 1

Spindle Shuttle Needle by Gab Reisman, directed by Tamilla Woodard May 15-27 In a cottage surrounded by endless siege, at the dawn of Modern Capitalism, a motley group of women tell tales, pick nits, and stretch out the last bits of sustenance til the Market reopens.

Bodies They Ritual, by Angele Hanks, directed by Knud Adams June 2-13

A Santa Fe sweat lodge lets loose what’s bottled up in a group of Texan ladies who have gathered for a birthday celebration. Will any of them taste that deep, deep spirituality only to be found in the American Southwest?

The Woman’s Party, by Rinne Groff, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad June 19-July 1

1947 is the year that the savvy politicos of the National Woman’s Party finally get the ERA passed— once they quash that insurgency. Or oust the old guard. Failure is Impossible.

Rest in Peace

Suddenly dancing The Madison in The Boys in the Band: Robin De Jesus, Michael Benjamin Washington, Andrew Rannells, Jim Parsons

Mart Crowley, 84, pioneering playwright of The Boys in the Band, which had a triumphant Broadway debut on its 50th anniversary in 2018.

Coronavirus Update: Responding Theatrically. #Stageworthy News of the Week. As local news of the spread of the coronavirus grows more alarming (with Governor Cuomo having declared a state of emergency in New York…

[buzzkillmag]

happy october! i know we’re less than a week away from halloween already but i figured now was as good a time as any to post this list i’d procrastinated for nearly a month. 

i’ve always been a secret fan of all things scary (meaning all i ever do is watch horror films and television shows and read horror novels, but haven’t ever had a community to share these with) and i know that not everyone has access to every single streaming service, so with the help of @amyelxine on twitter, buzzkill is proud to present the (subjectively) best horror films on netflix, hulu, and amazon prime.

NETFLIX

1. scream ⤷ this 90s classic is honestly the perfect way to kick off any halloween/horror movie marathon. it’s not too scary, and probably everyone reading this list has already seen it, so it’ll end up being a nice little rewatch (and if any of you guys have a horrible memory, like me, you only remember the major plot points). 

2. gerald’s game ⤷ based off of a stephen king novel, this movie is one of the best adaptations in recent years, in my opinion (not as good as IT but so much better than 2013′s carrie). i’m not sure how much i want to say about it, because i don’t want to give anything away for anyone who’s never watched it or who never read the book, but it’s definitely worth a watch, especially this time of year.

3. i am the pretty thing that lives in the house ⤷ this netflix original gothic supernatural horror film was relatively well-received by horror fans when it premiered in october of 2016, but much less so by critics. i have to admit that this is one of many on this list i’ve never seen, but i included it because i trust @amyelxine’s judgement when it comes to horror. it’s about a live-in nurse who cares for an elderly author, and the nurse is led to believe that the house is haunted.

4. terrifier ⤷i have yet to see this movie as well as i’m absolutely petrified of clowns (thanks, pennywise!) and even more so of serial killer clowns, so i’m going to pass on this, but if you’re not of the faint of heart like i am, you should totally watch it, as it’s favored by a lot of horror fans!

5. hush ⤷a creepy film about a deaf writer who’s isolated herself in the middle of the woods to finish her book and ends up preyed upon by a serial killer. this one is: complete insanity. 

6. creep (and creep 2 honestly) ⤷this entire franchise is immaculate. written and produced by mark duplass, who also plays the main character, is about a man who responds to a craigslist ad for a videographer. the job is seemingly harmless: the poster wants to hire someone to create a film for his unborn son, as he only has a few months to live and will never get to meet him. the rest is complete and utter - enjoyable - chaos.

7. the haunting of hill house ⤷based off of shirley jackson’s acclaimed novel of the same name, this series revolves around a family who grew up in a house haunted by more than just ghosts, and how they’re still dealing with the consequences of that haunting. not just spooky - also deeply sad! perfect for the holiday season!

8. penny dreadful ⤷i genuinely cannot believe it took me as long as it did to get into this show. it’s a glorious amalgamation of all things gothic, a cross between supernatural and iconic literary classics we all know and love. it’s rather short, and so would definitely be easy to binge at halloween. 

9. silence of the lambs ⤷this is another classic i can’t imagine skipping during autumn. i first saw this movie when i was 12 or 13 and when i say hannibal lecter shook me to my core - and still does - i am not exaggerating. 

10. coraline ⤷now, i know not everyone counts this as a horror film, but it truly is horrific and beautiful. i’m sure everyone definitely knows of this movie, but it’s essentially about a young girl who feels underappreciated and unseen by her parents, and finds a door into another world where everything is the same - except everyone has buttons for eyes. it’s absolutely gorgeous and i’d definitely recommend watching it this time of year. 

11. as above, so below ⤷ now THIS is a MOVIE. i’ve seen this film probably three or four times (probably more, but i used to have to watch it from between my fingers, so some of them don’t count). i love found footage films, and i think this is one of the most terrifying out of all of them. it’s like a spooky national treasure. i’d really recommend jumping into this blind!

HULU

1. into the dark series ⤷blumhouse productions, who’ve brought us films like get out, the visit, and the lazarus effect, has been releasing one nearly-full-length horror film a month for the last eleven, and they are all masterpieces. my personal favorites so far have been “the body,” “treehouse,” and “pure.” every episode of the anthology series has underlying, moral themes. none of them are just straight horror; most of them are either thrillers or psychological horrors. i wanted to highlight these first because i’m not sure if very many people know they exist, but i would highly, highly recommend this series if you have hulu.

2. a quiet place ⤷ one of the most popular horror films of the late 2010′s is john krasinski’s directorial debut about a family living in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters roam the earth and attack at the slightest sound. the most shocking event occurs in the first ten minutes of the film. i remember how deathly quiet the theater was when i saw this one - everyone was too afraid to make a sound!

3. seven  ⤷ brad pitt and morgan freeman star in this cult classic about two detectives engaged in a game of cat and mouse with a serial killer whose pet project is the seven deadly sins. the movie’s mostly known for its iconic line “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!” but the whole thing’s a masterpiece!

4. amityville horror ⤷ i hate to admit it, but i’ve never seen the original film - only this 2005 remake with ryan reynolds (that he is absolutely incredible in) - but from what i’ve heard, the remake is just as terrifying as the 1979 classic. it’s a slow burn that allows you to watch as the patriarch of the lutz family descends into madness.

5. castle rock ⤷ a self-proclaimed “psychological-horror series set in the stephen king multiverse,” the first season of this show is centered on a strange man found in a cage in an abandoned cellblock of the prison in castle rock. the rest is worth the watch to find out.

6. light as a feather ⤷ this hulu original teen horror-drama is relatively easy to consume in one sitting, and if you like shows like the vampire diaries and teen wolf, you’ll definitely like this one, about a group of friends who meet a girl and play a game with her and die, one by one. 

AMAZON PRIME

1. hereditary ⤷ hereditary is easily the scariest movie i’ve seen. ever. it’s about as far off from a straight forward horror movie as one gets, and the psychological aspects of it are just as - if not more disturbing than - the gore in this movie. if it’s difficult for you to stomach gore, i wouldn’t suggest you watch this one, but if you can, please do!

2. rosemary’s baby ⤷ surprise! you’re pregnant. even bigger surprise: it’s the antichrist!

3. saw ⤷ another one of those movies you just can’t skip when talking about the best horror movies anywhere. this franchise has transcended decades, but the original is my personal favorite, in which two men wake in an unfamiliar room and are told to kill the other or their family will die.  

4. hellraiser ⤷ this movie is quite strange but very enjoyable nonetheless, and to try to explain it to you would be like pulling the nails from the film’s protagonist (i guess you could call him that?) one by one. 

5. the corpse bride ⤷ tim burton’s masterpiece about a man who wanders into the forest on the eve of his wedding and ends up in the land of the dead, kidnapped, essentially, by a woman who was murdered after eloping with her lover. burton-esque creepiness ensues. 

6. sleepy hollow (1999) ⤷ almost everyone is aware of the legend of sleepy hollow (and if you’re not, have you been living under a rock?) and this 1999 tim burton film starring johnny depp as ichabod crane, an investigator brought to the small town in downstate new york to look into the mysterious beheadings the community seems to be plagued with.

#horror #horror film #horror films #horror movie #horror movies #streaming #stream #streaming movies #stream movies #streaming films #stream films #netflix #hulu #amazon prime

[frankterranella]

Paging through memories of nights in the theater

Above, clockwise from top left, are my Playbills from Into the Woods, my first Broadway show Grease, a 1972 flop musical called Via Galactica, and Julie Harris in 1976 as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst.

By FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the great things about living near Manhattan is how easy it is to partake of all the world-class entertainment. There’s opera and symphony and all kinds of professional sports. There are countless jazz clubs and other venues to hear every genre of music. But above all, there’s theater.

I have been a theater fanatic ever since I saw my first Broadway show almost 50 years ago. Back then, you could sit in the balcony of a Broadway theater for $8.00 or less (depending on the show).  I remember seeing Pippin in 1972 for $12 (I had splurged for front mezzanine seats). Because theater was so inexpensive, I did it all the time in the ‘70s. And I was such a fan, that I kept every Playbill. As you can well imagine, I have hundreds of them now.

I bring this up because I was cleaning up the basement recently and throwing away as much of the junk I have collected in the last half century as I could. I came upon the boxes of theater programs and had to make a decision — keep or trash. Now I am at the stage of life where I am trying to downsize. My kids are all grown and married and I don’t need to keep paying for the upkeep of a four-bedroom house. So we are trying to get rid of all the stuff we don’t really need in order to be able to live in a smaller home.

I have had no problem throwing away scores of audio and video cassettes as well as lots of books and records. But the Playbill stash has so many happy memories, that it was tough to be as ruthless.

My collection began in 1972 with my first Broadway show, the original Broadway production of Grease with Barry Bostwick as Danny Zuko. The balcony tickets were $6.60.  I had just come back from a five-week backpacking tour of Europe, and I was anxious to explore New York the way I had explored Paris and Rome. There’s nothing like seeing other cities to make you appreciate the big city nearby. I resolved to partake of all the cultural riches just across the Hudson.

My parents had never taken me to the theater. They were movie people. They made me believe that Broadway was for rich people. But as I have said, ticket prices at the time were under $10.  Of course, movie tickets were under $3.00. But I think that the bigger reason we never went to see a Broadway show was that they were a bit intimidated by New York City. So we rarely went there except once or twice a year to Radio City Music Hall, which in those days featured a movie and a stage show featuring acts like you could have seen in vaudeville decades earlier. And of course at Christmas they had their special Christmas pageant. But that was as close as I ever got to live theater while I was a kid. That changed when I went to see Grease in 1972.

Recently, as I opened my stash of programs, among the treasures I found was the opening night Playbill for a 1979 Lerner and Lane musical called Carmelina. My front mezzanine opening night tickets cost $19.50. The show was quite forgettable, but it didn’t matter. Opening nights back then were always special because the critics were all there.They sat on the aisle so they could make a quick exit and run back to their newspapers and write their reviews on deadline. Opening night performances usually began early for that reason. The norm was 6:30 or 7:00.

The next year I sat in the orchestra for the opening night of a revival of West Side Story (tickets cost $23.50). In point of fact, I sat in the last row of the orchestra. But I was rewarded by having Stephen Sondheim standing right behind me, watching the first revival of what was his first Broadway show. His co-writer Leonard Bernstein was nowhere to be seen. Speaking of Sondheim, I have a Playbill from the original production of Into The Woods that I got Stephen Sondheim to sign. It’s probably my most prized Playbill.

Lest you think that I only went to musicals on Broadway, I have Playbills from several Neil Simon comedies as well as Broadway productions of 12 Angry Men, That Championship Season, and a 1992 production of Streetcar Named Desire where Alec Baldwin played Stanley and Jessica Lange played Blanche. I loved the straight plays as much as the musicals. It was the fact that they were live that was so appealing.

What makes my theater program collection more interesting is the fact that I also have the programs from shows I saw in London, Washington and Boston, among other places. In fact, I even have the programs from community theater productions I saw in New Jersey.  It’s a lifetime of theatergoing memories all in one place.

And theatergoing away from Broadway became more common for me beginning in the 1980s, as Broadway ticket prices went through the roof. While movie prices made their way to $10, Broadway tickets zoomed to $100 and beyond. So Broadway turned into what my parents had always believed -- entertainment for rich people. As a result, I sought out off-Broadway and regional theater, and I was rewarded handsomely. In my opinion, the most innovative theater today is not on Broadway; it’s in the smaller theaters in Manhattan and beyond. And I have all those programs as well.

So I will not be trashing my theater program collection. It brings me joy paging through and remembering my lifetime of theatergoing. And I will keep adding to the collection. In fact, as I write this, I am going to the theater this evening. Movies are great, but there’s nothing like live theater. And there’s probably nowhere in the world that has more of it per square mile than the New York metropolitan area. It’s our compensation for all the horrendous traffic.

[brothermarc7theatre]

Season Announcement Wednesday

It’s that time again where I highlight a theatre company’s newly-announced season. The point of these posts is to make you aware of the shows being done near or around you, and to simply to raise awareness that there is a multitude of theatre companies that exist in and around the Bay Area and Central Valley. These two areas are where 95% of my theatre watching happens, and when I find a company whose work I admire and respect, you better believe I will do all I can to spread the word and help get butts in their seats. This week’s company is no exception. Let’s take a gander at Cabrillo Stage’s exciting 2019 season!

Shows/Dates: Beehive (June 27th - July 14th); Into the Woods (July 25th - August 18th)

Venue/Address: Crocker Theater @ Cabrillo College, 6500 Soquel Drive, Aptos 95003

Website: www.cabrillostage.com

Facebook: “Like” them at- Cabrillo Stage Summer Musical Festival

Twitter: “Follow” them at- @cabrillostage

Description: The trek to Cabrillo Stage is always a journey for me, no matter where I am located; however, every time I make the trip, I leave happy, fulfilled, and energized from the theatre I just saw. Their professionalism, quality of technical designs, and talented casts and creative teams are always worth the price of admission. Over the years, I have had the thorough pleasure of seeing their productions of The Last Five Years, Urinetown, and The Producers (twice!). This upcoming season brings female empowerment and throwback tunes, as well as life lessons about children and fairy tale endings to the Aptos community. I sure hope to see you at the theater. Go see a show!

#cabrillostage #aptos #bayarea #bayareatheatre #beehiv #intothewoods #musical #theatre #musicaltheatre #seasonannouncementwednesday