This Sunday is the 24th annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Flea Market and Auction. Photos, costumes, and assorted memoribillia will be on display and for sale. In addition, Broadway celebs will be on hand to be seen and sign purchases.
An all day event, from 10am-7pm, is being held in Shubert Alley and 44th street. It’s not only fun, and a great way to support a cause dear to many in the theatre community, it’s also a great way to be a part of the community.
Amongst all, my favorite quote (regarding how he chooses which shows to produce)was this:
My shows initially sound impossible. If it sounds like a sure thing, I run away. Theater is an inconvenient business, and you have to surprise people. I am an enemy of cynicism, and the cynicism comes when you aim too low.
With the advent of movie and jukebox musicals, it seems like so many producers, and audiences, keep going for the “sure thing”… but the problem is, it insulates and isolates producers and audiences so far from risk that new works suffer. Yes, a show might suck, but it might also be great — and that’s what makes theatre great… stumbling on the show that turns out to be a gem.
Sometimes, something might seem inconvenient on the surface, but the payoff can be truly amazing.
School’s back in session, and though it seems like it’s too early for report cards just yet, an interesting one was circulated today by The Americans for the Arts Action Fund. It evaluates our senate leaders in terms of their performance via arts legislation. A tally of their voting was the measure by which the grades were given.
Of the 28 senators who got a failing grade, most were Republican… I’m not making judgments, I’m more interested to know why that is… and hope these senators aren’t just playing to the stereotype.
New York’s senators, home of Broadway, MOMA, the Met, Carnegie Hall… did fantastically well. They obviously know how vital arts are to our economy. How can we spread this to other states/senate leaders so that they get this message as well?
Much of the East Coast senators did well… Is it due to the fact that they are still in close proximity to New York, or that our values in this part of the country are different? (West coast senators also happened to do well, and it’s probably because of their robust film and theatre communities and economies as well.)
But what about the middle states? What are those school aged children learning in the absence of arts legislation and subsequent programming that never sees the light of day because there isn’t any funding to support it?
More than these “failing” senators, it’s their communities, that are suffering.
Husbands, bless them, sometimes need to hear from a stranger what their wives have already told them to believe what they’ve heard. It’s nothing personal, just a universal truth. I shared this truth with a friend over email, and through her email response I could hear her laughing in agreement, having seen it for herself.
It’s in that universal truth that comedy is born. Something strikes us as funny when we know it to be true.
Writing comedy for theatre is such a challenge for this very reason… but it’s also so satisfying for the creators and the audience. As people, we want to see ourselves and be able to laugh from time to time. Writing a comedy will be a challenge to be sure, but definitely one I’d like to undertake in the future.
This past weekend we celebrated the second half of the Jewish New Year. A little more challenging than the first part which is all about a sweet upcoming year, the second part is about atonement and reflecting on the person you’ve been in the past year and who you’d like to be in the coming year.
One holiday wouldn’t make much sense without the other, and there are things about both that I really enjoy. What I like most is that it’s a time specifically earmarked for reflection individually and as a community, as it’s so easy to stumble through our days without giving the “bigger picture” a second thought. We get so caught up in doing all the time, that we sometimes forget about being… and what it is to be human, and even humane.
That’s part of why I like theatre so much. It is a time earmarked specifically for us to get off the hamster wheel of life, where errands and obligations are magically suspended in the air as we, as individuals and as a community, take time to reflect on the human condition, and be entertained while we’re at it.
I awoke this morning to a call from my composer. He was bummed… something he’d been working on fizzled out. He had really been hoping for some traction.
I could have been bummed too… but this theatre’s physical restrictions had inspired us both a few weeks ago to take a new spin on how we’d like to tell this story, and given us a new artistic direction to pursue that will help set us apart and strengthen the integrity and some of the elements of the show. And so, I was glad that in trying to solve a logistical problem (that we were only considering because of this theatre’s restrictions) we were able to be creative.
This new direction is also inspiring us to pursue other venues once we’ve refined the show… This experience reminds us once again that when one door closes, a window opens. We had to search for the window, and we’re the ones prying it open, but a window is still a window!
Australian producers are hoping to bring a musical version of King Kong to Broadway by 2013. They’ve been working diligently to insure their 23 foot Kong creation is in good working order to carry off a show, and feel the spectacle of having him in a contained space could be something that will draw in audiences.
Though it sounds exciting, and their bet might pay off, I’m not sure how long lived something like that might be — and it will need to be to recoup, especially considering how expensive it will be to not only keep Kong in working order (which will have a hefty union contract attached to it), but also keep a hefty weekly payroll going for the proposed 40 actors (and understudies) they want to cast. And then consider all the costumes for all those actors. The list goes on and on…
I’m all for thinking big, I just wonder how this will pan out…
Teens are getting the opportunity to play theatre critic in Florida’s Broward County.
The program is tuning into enthusiasm for shows like Glee, but more importantly, they are asking teens to share their critiques with their peers through their social networks like facebook.
In addition to giving the next generation an outlet for expressing themselves, it’s also a way to help get the next generation involved on a community level — while giving them the opportunity to be leaders in their own communities.
Forward thinking programs like this one, which not only benefit the teens involved, but their immediate and extended communities as well, is the future of keeping the arts alive and vital beyond Broadway — in the hearts and minds of everyone.
I’ve been asked more than a few times how one knows when to “put a song” into a musical. My simplest answer is when a character is so overcome with emotion that he or she has no other choice but to sing.
Any occasion or circumstance can bring it on at any point of the story, but it’s usually emotion that drives a song.
In the video above, Lin-Manuel Miranda of In the Heights fame proves that point. Enjoy, and L’Chaim!
Today was another slash and burn session… Cutting away at lines with my mechanical pencil like a machete through the thick brush in the deep deep forests. (I even have the bug bites to boot, but I think those are from apple picking this past weekend.)
As necessary as this is, it is sometimes challenging. Today’s challenge was reading dialogue that was painfully bad and wondering how I committed those words to a page (and then had those words read aloud and heard by my peers).
And so, once my critic was done with her shtick, my higher self (the part that knows better), said a few simple words… words I’ve been carrying around since grad school: “Write it down today, get it right tomorrow.”
In an instant I realized, it wasn’t the words being cut away, it was my ego… and there’s no room for that if I want this work to be what I know it can be.
