Tag: Drama

RIP Michael Gambon, Anecdote from Anthony Sher book

Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82
After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.

Below from, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook, by Antony Sher. Gambon talking about his audition for Olivier, where he did Richard III.

Gambon: `Shall I start again?’
Olivier: `No. I think I’ve got a fair idea how you’re going to do it. You’d better get along now. We’ll let you know.’

Gambon went back to the engineering factory in Islington where he was working. At four that afternoon he was bent over his lathe, working as best as he could with a heavily bandaged hand, when he was called to the phone. It was the Old Vic.

`It’s not easy talking on the phone, Tone. One, there’s the noise of the machinery. Two, I have to keep my voice down ’cause I’m cockney at work and posh with theatre people. But they offer me a job, spear-carrying, starting immediately. I go back to my work-bench, heart beating in my chest, pack my tool-case, start to go. The foreman comes up, says, “Oy, where you off to?” “I’ve had bad news,” I say, “I’ve got to go.” He says, “Why are you taking your tool box?” I say, “I can’t tell you, it’s very bad news, might need it.” And I never went back there, Tone. Home on the bus, heart still thumping away. A whole new world ahead. We tend to forget what it felt like in the beginning.’

Are Humans Much Better than AI?

Prim Look, when Trudi comes back I’ll get her to strip it down for you. She can peel it’s outer casing off, you can see for yourself. It’s just a lot of wires and circuits and micro-servos and – bits. In no way is it a person. And it’s actually quite bad of you to think of it as a person, Adam. It’s called actoid empathy. It happens. When we do our basic staff training, we do a day on dealing with actoids. Always refer to them as it, never as he or she. Never converse with them except strictly in the line of work. Never, never socialize. As soon as you’ve finished with them, switch them off. Otherwise you risk getting emotionally involved, you get all screwed up and you also screw them up and then you don’t know where you are –

Adam But if you’d heard her talking to me. The things she says –

Prim What it talks about, Adam – the words it uses – it’s so-called conversation – that’s merely an amalgam of all the conversations of all the characters it’s played in all the shows it’s ever been in. Its personality is nothing more than that. Every time you speak to it, you trigger some response. It pulls it out of its memory bank and blurts it back to you. That’s all it’s doing.

Adam Maybe that’s all any of us do.

Comic Potential
Alan Ayckbourn

Comic Potential by Alan Ayckbourn is a romantic sci-fi comedy play. It is set in a TV studio in the foreseeable future, when low-cost androids (known as “actoids”) have largely replaced actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Potential

Nagg and Nell – Beckett’s Love Story

Hamm: Throughout the play remaining seated in an armchair fitted with castors, unable to stand and blind. Hamm is dominating, acrimonious, banterous and comfortable in his misery. He claims to suffer, but his pessimism seems self-elected. He chooses to be isolated and self-absorbed. His relationships come off as parched of human empathy; he refers to his father as a “fornicator”, refused to help his neighbor with oil for her lamp when she badly needed it, and has a fake pet dog which is a stuffed animal.

Clov: Hamm’s servant who is unable to sit. Taken in by Hamm as a child. Clov is wistful. He longs for something else, but has nothing to pursue. More mundane than Hamm, he reflects on his opportunities but takes little charge. Clov is benevolent, but weary.

Nagg: Hamm’s father who has no legs and lives in a dustbin. Nagg is gentle and fatherly, yet sorrowful and aggrieved in the face of his son’s ingratitude.

Nell: Hamm’s mother who has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg. Reflective, she delivers a monologue about a beautiful day on Lake Como, and apparently dies during the course of the play.

Samuel Beckett said that in his choice of character’s names, he had in mind the word “hammer” and the word “nail” in English, French and German respectively, “clou” and “nagel”.

Beckett was an avid chess player, and the term endgame refers to the ending phase of a chess game. The play is dimly visible as a kind of metaphorical chess, albeit with limited symbolic meaning. Hamm at one point says “My kingdom for a knight-man!”. Hamm, limited in his movement, resembles the king piece on a chess board, and Clov, who moves for him, a knight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_(play)

I’ve never seen a greater love scene in modern literature than those two old people in the ash cans. I’ve always said, it’s easy to write a love scene on the back seat of a Cadillac with the leopard-skin seats. But if you really make me believe in love, two old people whose legs are cut off, who live in sawdust in an ash can, that shows great compassion and great understanding.

Alan Schneider
The director who introduced the works of Samuel Beckett to American audiences, beginning with Waiting for Godot. Since then, he has directed all the plays of Edward Albee.

from interview with Studs Terkel, found in
The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With the People Who Make Them

Forgetting Your Song and Finding Your Song – August Wilson

In his theatrical vocabulary, “finding a song” is both the expression of spirit and the accomplishment of identity. Some of his characters have a song that they can’t broadcast; others have given up singing; some have been brutalized into near-muteness; and others have turned the absence of a destiny into tall talk—the rhetoric of deferred dreams. But Wilson’s most brilliant demonstration of “carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own”—as one character puts it—is in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, where a conjure man called Bynum, who has a song, discourses with Loomis, who has been separated from his. Bynum says:

Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life. See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it . . . till he find out he’s got it with him all the time.

Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows
John Lahr

Anne Frank Play – 1956 Berlin Performance, Kenneth Tynan on

And at the Schlosspark, last Monday, I survived the most dramatic emotional experience the theatre has ever given me. It had little to do with art, for the play was not a great one, yet its effect, in Berlin, at that moment of history, transcended anything that art has yet learned to achieve. It invaded the privacy of the whole audience: I tried hard to stay detached, but the general catharsis engulfed me. Like all great theatrical occasions, this was not only a theatrical occasion: it involved the world outside. The first page of the programme prepared one: a short, stark essay on collective guilt. Turn over for the title: The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by Boleslaw Barlach. It is not a vengeful dramatisation. Quietly, often gaily, it re-creates the daily life of eight Jews who hid for two years in an Amsterdam attic before the Gestapo broke in. Otto Frank was the sole survivor: Anne was killed in Belsen.

When I saw the play in New York it vaguely perturbed me: there seemed no need to do it: it smacked of exploitation. The Berlin actors (especially Johanna von Koczian and Walter Franck) were better on the whole and devouter than the Americans, but I do not think that was why the play seemed so much more urgent and necessary on Monday night. After the interval the man in front of me put his head in his hands and did not afterwards look at the stage. He was not, I believe, Jewish. It was not until the end that one fully appreciated Barlog’s wisdom and valour in using an entirely non-Jewish cast. Having read the last lines of the diary, which affirm, movingly and irrationally, Anne Frank’s unshattered trust in human goodness, Otto Frank closes the book and says, very slowly: ‘She puts me to shame.’

Thus the play ended. The houselights went up on an audience that sat drained and ashen, some staring straight ahead, others staring at the ground, for a full half-minute. Then, as if awakening from a nightmare, they rose and filed out in total silence, not looking at each other, avoiding even the customary blinks of recognition with which friend greets friend. There was no applause, and there were no curtain-calls.

All of this, I am well aware, is not drama criticism. In the shadow of an event so desperate and traumatic, criticism would be an irrelevance. I can only record an emotion that I felt, would not have missed, and pray never to feel again.

Berlin Postscript
Observer, 7 October 1956

From:
Theatre Writings
Kenneth Tynan

Star Wars – Rehearsal Clip

At this point, neither of us had read the full script, only this one scene. I was full of questions, but George said "Let's just try one & we'll talk about it later." Even though it felt like a parody of sci-fi, I decided to play it as sincerely as possible. #TrueStory https://t.co/e7cHWoujHk

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) January 2, 2023

Austin Powers as Metaphor for Change

‘This Fool’ (Hulu)
Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Sandy Says’

The closing seconds of this episode-long homage to “Austin Powers” were perhaps the most satisfying payoff I saw this year. “Sandy Says” exemplifies the tricky tone “This Fool” is able to strike, combining the structure of traditional sitcoms with the style of auteur comedies, hitting a sweet spot of goofy and clever. Luis (Frankie Quinones), newly out of prison, is in annoying-eighth-grader mode with his constant “Austin Powers” references, and the episode is packed with shagadelic Easter eggs before Luis explains part of why the movie means so much to him. “I’m tired of wasting time living in the past,” he says. “Ideally, we’ll change. The world is ever-changing, homey. I gotta change with it. That’s what ‘Austin Powers’ is all about. You know, I used to think that movie was a comedy. But now I know, it’s a tragedy.”

NYTIMES
The Best TV Episodes of 2022
TV in the streaming era is an endless feast. This year, series like “Barry,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Pachinko,” “Station Eleven” and “This Fool” offered some of the best bites.

Dinosaur Looks Back Poignantly – Best Theater of 2022 – The New York Times

Domesticated dino
The baby dinosaur in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Skin of Our Teeth” is a sweetheart, domesticated as a dog. And in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s visually extravagant Broadway production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, he was a puppet so enormous that he counted as one of the show’s several spectacles. When he and his mammoth pal — also a puppet, also designed by James Ortiz — came in from a ferocious cold snap to warm up in their human family’s living room, they were an endearing sight, wreaking benevolent havoc on the houseplants. Then the animals were ordered back outside, into the Ice Age, and the dinosaur gave a backward glance touched with innocence and doom — a more emotionally immediate argument about climate change than a thousand position papers.

LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

Best Theater of 2022
In a time of renewed awakening, a surprising number of shows smartly reflected those changes in song.

Hamlet – Old Language vs Modern

OLD LANGUAGE ====================================
HAMLET
Let me see. (takes the skull) Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.—Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

HORATIO What’s that, my lord?

HAMLET Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth?

HORATIO E’en so.

HAMLET And smelt so? Pah! (puts down the skull)

HORATIO E’en so, my lord.

HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio. Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?

HORATIO ’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

MODERN LANGUAGE ====================================
HAMLET
Let me see. (he takes the skull) Oh, poor Yorick! I used to know him, Horatio—a very funny guy, and with an excellent imagination. He carried me on his back a thousand times, and now—how terrible—this is him. It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know how many times I kissed the lips that used to be right here. Where are your jokes now? Your pranks? Your songs? Your flashes of wit that used to set the whole table laughing? You don’t make anybody smile now. Are you sad about that? You need to go to my lady’s room and tell her that no matter how much makeup she slathers on, she’ll end up just like you some day. That’ll make her laugh. Horatio, tell me something.

HORATIO What’s that, my lord?

HAMLET Do you think Alexander the Great looked like this when he was buried?

HORATIO Exactly like that.

HAMLET And smelled like that, too? Whew! (he puts down the skull)

HORATIO Just as bad, my lord.

HAMLET How low we can fall, Horatio. Isn’t it possible to imagine that the noble ashes of Alexander the Great could end up plugging a hole in a barrel?

HORATIO If you thought that you’d be thinking too much.

Hamlet
SparkNotes
“No Fear Shakespeare pairs Shakespeare’s language with translations into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today. When Shakespeare’s words make your head spin, our translations will help you sort out what’s happening, who’s saying what, and why.”

Noises off – Intro, Quote from

It was during the run of my very first professional show, The Two of Us, four one-acters in which Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers played eleven characters between them. Five of those characters were in the final farce. One night I watched it from backstage, and as I saw Lynn and Richard running desperately from door to door, doing quick changes as they went, it seemed to me that this was at least as funny as what was going on round the front. It also struck me that the overwhelming obligation actors feel to make their next entrance on time, come what may backstage, was the archetype of the obligation we all feel to keep up our appearances in the world, despite all the difficulties of circumstance and the inherent waywardness of our nature. What would happen, I wondered, if the strictly ordered disorder of a farce onstage was overrun by the real disorder of the actors’ lives off…?

Noises Off
Michael Frayn

Chekhovian – Michael Blakemore on

The sort of production I aspired to was the very opposite of what at the time was conveyed by the adjective ‘Chekhovian’. Though the plays may leave you with a sense of the sadness and bleakness of life, this is not what they describe. Chekhov’s characters are for ever on the hunt for amusement of some sort, anything to distract them from the underlying drift of their lives. They play games, stage amateur theatricals, enjoy magic shows, or just sit under the trees in the garden having long circular conversations over their tea. And they are always offering each other hospitality. The first two acts of Three Sisters are both extended parties, and the most spectacular party of all, the most absurd, is the ball given by Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard on the day she and her brother put the family home up for auction. Her social equals who would normally have attended such an occasion have all moved away from the district or died. However, so determined is she to cheer herself up with music and company that she makes up the numbers of guests by inviting such people as the Postal Clerk and the Stationmaster. This is surely as funny as it is tragic, and suggests that the playwright was not joking when he described the play as a comedy. Walk past a London pub on a warm summer night, with customers spilling on to the pavement: the intense and jubilant buzz of people absorbed in the pursuit of a good time blocks out any thought that for some of these same people (and for all of us eventually) winter is not far away. Chekhov allows us, unlike the pub’s customers, to see both these realities at once.

Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre
Michael Blakemore

Provocative Drama – Cassavetes on

When people were walking out of Husbands and Faces en masse I never felt bad about that because I thought that it was pain that was taking them out of the theater and I thought that it wasn’t the fact that the film was bad. It was that they couldn’t take it without changing their own lifestyles, which made both those films very successful to me. I thought at the time that Husbands was anti the lifestyle of almost everyone in America. We presented a lifestyle that went against their lifestyle. People walked out because they didn’t want to accept the fact that there could be anything wrong with the way they lived their lives.

It doesn’t matter whether audiences like it; it matters whether they feel something. I feel I’ve succeeded if I make them feel something — anything. The hope is that you don’t make it so easy for an audience that when they go to your movie they have nothing to think about except, ‘That was wonderful. Good. Next! What else are you going to entertain my great appetite with?’ I want to make you mad. Yeah, that’s going to take longer. And yeah, when we have it we’ll let you know, I mean. And we’ll put it there.

Cassavetes on Cassavetes
John Cassavetes, Ray Carney

Denzel Washington Honors August Wilson’s Legacy at House Opening

PITTSBURGH — On Saturday, crowds gathered outside August Wilson’s childhood home in the historic Hill District here to celebrate the grand opening of the August Wilson House. After a yearslong fund-raising and restoration effort, the house where the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright spent the first 13 years of his life will now be open to the public with the goal of extending Wilson’s legacy and advancing Black arts in culture.

Wilson, who died in 2005, is perhaps best known for his series of 10 plays called the American Century Cycle, which detail the various experiences of Black Americans throughout the 20th century. Nine of these plays are set in this city’s Hill District — a bastion of Black history, arts and culture — and one, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is set in Chicago.

Denzel Washington Honors August Wilson’s Legacy at House Opening
After fund-raising and restoration efforts, the childhood home of the playwright will offer artist residencies and other programming.
Ollie Gratzinger

Titanic as Musical Comedy

They called “Titanique” the show of dreams. Fever dreams. And it was, it really was.

The off-Broadway cuckoo camp-fest at the Asylum in Chelsea is, by a nautical mile, the funniest musical in town right now and is built on an unsinkable idea: It tells the story of the 1997 movie “Titanic” using the songs of French-Canadian chanteuse Celine Dion.

As the captain, hilariously only referred to as Victor Garber, an Irish-inflected Frankie Grande bops through “I Drove All Night” as he pushes the doomed ship to go faster and faster.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown, played by Kathy Deitch, after surviving the tragedy, belts “All By Myself”: “Those days are goooone!”

The situation has become beyond bonkers by the time Jaye Alexander as the Iceberg wails “River Deep, Mountain High” in a neon blue flapper wig and forces the other characters to “Lip Sync For Your Lifeboats.”

‘Titanique’ the musical review: Off-Broadway ‘Titanic’ parody is what your summer needs
Johnny Oleksinski