Author Archives: Christopher Arnott
Westport Country Playhouse Knows What It’ll Be Doing For Over a (Magical) Year from Now
The Westport Country Playhouse hasn’t yet opened the final two shows in its current season (Suddenly Last Summer Aug. 23-Sept. 10 and Twelfth Night Oct. 11-Nov. 5), and they’re already announced their full slate for 2012. How quaint, to follow a calendar-year season schedule rather than the school-year model preferred by most regional theaters. But … Continue reading
England’s Riots: We’ll Rumble Them Right?
The scene felt like it was in a movie. The mayor, white blond hair flopping in its Dulux dog way, bumbled down a cordoned-off Lavender Hill, past firefighters dousing what used to be a party shop. His smallish media mob—featuring fuzzy microphones, aides, camera and hangers-on—headed towards the much bigger broom mob, waiting to start … Continue reading
Half a Dozen Great Animated Broadway (or Broadway-style) Musicals
Oh, Streetcar—The Springfield Community Players. I’m one of those Simpsons fans who’s only conversant in the show’s first six or seven seasons. If they’ve ever done a better multi-part Broadway musical parody than this stellar takedown of A Streetcar Named Desire, I need to know about it. Runners-up (also from early seasons): The Planet of … Continue reading
Playing the Market
Everybody has decided that everybody is panicking. So everybody is screaming and getting up and running out of the theater. —BU Economics prof Laurence J. Kotlikoff, quoted in the Aug. 9 Boston Globe story “An Avalanche of Worry—World Markets Plunge on Fears Over US, European Economies A dizzying array of disaster metaphors in today’s news. … Continue reading
Artistic Viz-ion
I’ve been reading VIz for over 20 years, shortly after it debuted and when I was still in its target audience of horny, irrespressibly young adults who think they’re smarter than everyone else. I never “outgrew” the magazine partly because I never “outgrew” the British comic books and tabloid newspapers which it satirizes. Also because … Continue reading
Travelin’ Light
A Guys and Dolls matchbook bought at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. This is a hip independent bookshop, and the other matchbooks for sale were all lit-based rather than theatrical. The image on the matchbook cover is from the first edition of Damon Runyon’s short story collection Guys and Dolls (with an intro by Heywood Broun), … Continue reading
Sides
I put together this facsimile paper theater (from Pollock’s Toy Theatres, published in 1972) with scissors and a gluestick. The only remaining thing is to figure out what to present in it. For a paper theater, something flat, black & white and two-dimensional seems appropriate. But if I did a Wendy Wasserstein play, I’d have … Continue reading
Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock
It wasn’t really a musical event. It was a theatrical production of a musical event. —Barry Tashian in the October 2010 issue of Shindig! magazine, quoting bandmate Bill Briggs about what it was like for their band The Remains to tour with The Beatles in 1966.
I saw a smith stand with his hammer thus
At this point in our careers, we checked into hotels under pseudonyms. If you used real name, you’d have a tribute band delivering your room service or a girl larger than your whole family trying to climb through your window. Mentioning the name Aerosmith brought nothing but pain and penicillin . But then what else … Continue reading
More Lou Harry Trivia Games
The first three rounds are here and the answers to those first three rounds are here For the uninitiated, these questions emanate from a pub quiz which the wonderful Lou Harry of the Indianapolis Business News put together one night for a bunch of theater journalists who were in L.A. as part of an NEA/Annenberg … Continue reading