Earlier this month Goodspeed Musicals announced the third of the three shows planned for its 2011-12 season at its Goodspeed Opera House home base. Yesterday they announced the second of the three shows which will play its smaller and more progressive space, the Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.
The show is Amazing Grace, based on the life of the British minister and abolitionist who composed the tune that gives the musical its title. John Newton (1725-1807) had other hit hymns, such as “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” and wrote the bestselling pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade.
This is one of those projects that’s already been drumming up attention for itself. Amazing Grace has a website at http://agmusical.com with biographies of its entire creative team.
Interest in Newton, a onetime slave trader who renounced that profession and found religion, has been intense in recent years. Since 2006, there’ve been two films (Amazing Grace, starring Albert Finney, and The Amazing Grace, starring Nick Moran) and a play (African Snow by Murray Watts) inspired by Newton’s life. The musical takes a new tack—its narrative voice is female, that of Newton’s “childhood friend Mary Catlett, the woman who never lost faith in him and whose love, courage and unshakable conviction helped to transform his life.”
Amazing Grace’s composer/lyricist is Christopher Smith. A reading of Amazing Grace in New York attracted Lambs Theatre Company founder Carolyn Rossi Copeland, who’s now attached as the show’s producer.
Gabriel Barre, a Goodspeed regular for much of the ‘90s—as both director and actor—is slated to direct.
The rest of the team, according to the Amazing Grace website:
Arthur Giron (book co-author), prolific playwright and former head of the graduate playwriting program at Carnegie Mellon University.
Kimberly Grigsby (music supervisor), whose Broadway conducting credits include Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, The Light in the Piazza, Caroline or Change and Spring Awakening.
Jodie Moore (music director), another busy Broadway conductor (of American Idiot, Spring Awakening, Hair and Hairspray) who’s also been on the road with several national Broadway tours.
Beowulf Boritt (set designer) who has the coolest name ever. He designed productions of Pippin(directed by Gabriel Barre) and Abyssinia for the Goodspeed five or six years ago, and has since done a slew of big Broadway shows (Rock of Ages, Scottsboro Boys, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and dozens of Off Broadway things.
Toni-Leslie James (costume designer), the Obie-winning designer of the duds in everything from Angels in America to several August Wilson plays, and who outfitted The Old Masters at Long Wharf Theatre last season.
Kenny Seymour (orchestrator), the veteran soul/R&B arranger and performer who was the music director for the Broadway hit Memphis. Seymour’s got the coolest pedigree: his mother was in the original Broadway cast of Hair, while his father was in an early ‘60s line-up of Little Anthony & The Imperials.
Benoit-Swan Pouffer (choreographer), who danced with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Donald Byrd/The Group before becoming a stage & film choreographer.
Amazing Grace will play Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre May 17 to June 10—the middle of the season, which will end in November with the musicalization of Julie Andrews’ book The Great American Mousical (directed by Andrews). The first slot in the 2012 Norma Terris season has yet to be announced.
My reaction to Macbeth 1969—which has its final few performances this week, closing after the Sunday matinee Feb. 12—was strongly visceral: blinding lights, frantic movement, throbbing drumbeats and heartbeats as harbingers of gunshots.
Most of my critical brethren, I notice, overlooked the visual impact of this production and instead took it as an opportunity to prove they’ve read Macbeth before. I find such nattering textual analysis as boring in theater reviews as I do in theater history texts. Nothing wrong with challenging an actor’s line reading, or a director’s concept, but I’m bewildered by these reviews which willfully ignore some stunning technical effects, or noteworthy performance techniques, in favor of staring at the script or program in your lap. Deal with the show, not the idea of the show, while you still have the show to see, please!
I was barely out of my seat, still walking down the aisle, after the opening night performance of Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf, when I got into my first animated discussion about what I’d just seen. This led to another discussion, with another person, before I’d even hit the bottom stair. Which led to my being ushered across the auditorium to talk about it some more.
Here I happened to meet Macbeth 1969’s lighting designer, Tyler Micoleau. Before I could even indulge in pleasantries and introduce myself, I blurted out:
“How’d you backlight that snow?!”
I’ll be vague here for those who have not yet seen the production, but when MacDuff (Barret O’Brien) makes his big Act Five entrance (the first we see of him in this adaptation, arriving rather later than he does in the full uncut original script), he is presented with gleaming, overwhelming nature-stoked majesty, a thundering effect sharply and purposefully at odds with the scrawny frame of Macduff himself. The character’s got a backpack and snowshoes strapped to him. He reeks karma.
The moment shows the supernatural forces rising up against the murderous Macbeth at this point in the play, without actually insisting that the audience literally believe in witchcraft or divine vengeance. On another level, the blizzard bit simply jolts you out of your seat. And such jolts occur frequently throughout Macbeth 1969.
Micoleau, who lit Dan Hurlin’s tractor odyssey The Shoulder for Long Wharf Stage II in 1999, told me that an entire side wall of the Macbeth 1969 set (a clinical VA hospital environment designed by Mimi Lien) had to be whisked out of the way just for that 20-second blowout lighting effect. It was worth it. So were the gushes of blood which regularly punctuate this drama of wounded spirits. Each splash has to be expertly cleaned up by the actors portraying the nurses who spout the words of the Weird Sisters.
I don’t always attend the opening night receptions at Long Wharf, which tend to be too civilized and cocktail partyish for me. Substantive discussions about the work at hand just don’t materialize the way they do at, say, the Yale Rep, where you can always count on a grad student or two to deliver a blistering critique or authoritative analysis. I love the debate, see. After Macbeth 1969, I was sure I’d get one. I conversed with the stunned, the stultified, the amused, the bemused. I heard about veterans’ issues with the production and delved into dramaturgical nuance.
Not only, such a range of feelings would draw more and more people to see a show and join the debate. Now, it seems, if something is not perfectly pre-packaged and predictable, audiences stay away. Macbeth 1969, in all its complexity and contradictions, deserves to be a conversation piece, not a curiosity.
I sought out the show’s adaptor/ director (and Long Wharf’s Associate Artistic Director) Eric Ting, to check his own feelings about the reaction to this long-gestating pet project of his. We met for coffee this past Tuesday morning at JoJo’s.
“We’ve been doing talkbacks after every performance,” Ting told me, “and we’ve been getting about 30 people at each of them. I really believe in having that dialogue with the audience.”
“I do admit to a level of cognitive dissonance in the production, which could be hard for people who are not used to seeing theater in that way.” Ting describes a moment he witnesses at every performance, when the audience collectively leans forward and exhales. “It does get relentless towards the end of the show.”
Ting’s doesn’t come off as defensive—he’s simply sharing his own experiences in studying and staging the play—but for every charge that he’s “contrived,” he can counter with a dramaturgical revelation. “People have said, ‘You’re just blaming it all on PTSD,’ but that’s too reductive. People forget that both Macbeth and Banquo are sleepless before [their encounter with] the witches. These are two men who’ve just come back from the war.”
“I am saddened,” the director says, “that the response is keeping people from engaging with the theme of this piece, which is the psychological problems of war.” Ting mentions a man at a talkback who took the production to task for highlighting the war aspect of Macbeth when, the man felt, it’s really a play about “ambition.” Ting senses a “common need to distill each Shakespeare play into a central theme. But you need to realize that every Shakespeare play, except maybe the comedies, is informed by war. There’s a war in the recent past for every character in Shakespeare tragedies. Macbeth has been transformed by war.”
In some respects, Ting feels that terminology might be an issue here. “When you use the phrase ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ it has less dramatic impact. It’s a medical condition.” He reels off terms used to describe similar conditions in earlier wars: “Cowardice. Shell shock. Battle fatigue. We weren’t saying PTSD—we were saying “psychological toll from the war.”
There’s a broader labelling issue, too: “One thing we realized is that maybe shouldn’t have named it Macbeth at all,” the director conjectures, then notes that “the choices we were making are generally reflective of traditional productions.”
Macbeth 1969’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth as wracked with guilt over the “this kind of monster she’s unleashed” is hardly a new or extreme one, and is entirely appropriate to an ensemble-based production where a number of characters are given much stronger personalities and motivations than they often receive. The character of Macbeth is deliberately subdued, allowing the other characters to escape from his shadow and be their own selves.
“Some people said they thought the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech was ‘thrown away,’ and done as if it were no more important than anything else Macbeth was saying. That was intentional on our part. It was our aesthetic choice to make him normal. No bravado. No heroism. That came out our engagement with veterans. It would have been another thing entirely if we hadn’t engaged with the veteran community.”
Long Wharf consulted throughout the rehearsal process with veterans who’d founded their own theater troupe at a nearby VA hospital, and who have used drama therapy for their own psychological dealings with their wartime experiences.
The veterans counseled the director and actors to downplay conventional Hollywood (or Shakespearean) ideas of heroism; they didn’t apply to Viet Nam. The impulse was to humanize the soldiers, not give them superpowers. “These aren’t larger than life people,” Ting says. “They should be the same size as us. They should be us.”
Talking with Ting, I floated a few theories of my own—that people feel more empowered to debate high concepts when applied to Shakespeare than they are when equally bold directorial choices are made regarding newer or lesser known shows. I don’t remember anybody getting snippy when Ting rethought John Patrick Shanley’s shouty romantic comedy Italian-American Reconciliation as a dark, ensemble-based nostalgia-driven dreamscape last season.
We also talked about how Macbeth 1969 was something new for entrenched Long Wharf subscribers—the theater has done just a handful of Shakespeares in its nearly half-century existence—but might have fared differently just a mile away at the Yale School of Drama, which offers several reconceptualized Shakespeares are done every year.
Ting feels he wasn’t pushing the envelope as much as some would suggest. “I’ve been at Long Wharf for eight years now. I don’t set out to do esoteric things for our audience.” He simply has a familiarity with Shakespeare, and with the resources of Long Wharf Theatre, that made Macbeth 1969 seem workable and worthwhile. “I grew up in a household where English was not the first language,” he says. “I once saw a production of King Lear in Korea which was done in three different languages. I grew up respecting the elasticity in Shakespeare’s language. That’s where the natural dialogue [in Macbeth 1969] came from. I wanted it to seem familiar.” I shared my own Macbeth experiences with Ting—as a kid actor in summer stock and college theater, I played Macduff’s son three times before I was 10 years old, in three wildly different productions. Perhaps the best Macbeth I’ve ever seen was Peter Sellars’ production for the Boston Shakespeare Company in the early 1980s, which mirrored Ting’s in that numerous roles in the play were divided among a small fixed unit of performers. Ting used six, Sellars only three—and had the same three actors perform Beckett’s urn-clad one-act Play immediately before illuminating the Scottish play. Local critics and theatergoers are questioning the very concept of having Macbeth in a 20th century hospital, with the witches as nurses, but one of the most popular and acclaimed Macbeths of the past few years—the Tony-winning Patrick Stewart one from 2009, directed by Rupert Goold and filmed for the PBS show Great Performances, used that exact setting. Such provincialism in New Haven unnerves me.
Eric Ting continues to learn from the discussions, debates and reviews Macbeth 1969 has evoked, and welcomes the feedback. But some people, I empathized and lamented, have some odd “ideal” of Shakespeare they can’t shake, and those folks are really hard to reach.
Macbeth 1969 has several more performances—and talkbacks, and debates in the lobby—before it closes on Sunday, Feb. 12. If you’ve talked yourself out of seeing it, you really ought to reconsider. This is a show to see, not read. The historical and military symmetries between Shakespeare and Viet Nam are there, but so is so much else. That freakin’ snowstorm, for instance.
Pop scholars alert: You can go on YouTube and find a variety of ukulele players strumming a variation of “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” which goes “Has Anybody Seen My Cow?”
Little do they know that there is a song from 1933 which uses that same line, “Has anybody seen my cow?,” non-parodically (though nonetheless comically), and has a Shakespearean twist in its second verse besides.
The song is “Farmer Jones,” by Dick Sanford and George McConnell, whose other immortal works include “When It’s Pie Plant Time in Texas,” “Someone’s Been Walking on Poor Mother’s Grave,” “The Wouldn’t Song” (about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” the drinking song “Drunk Song,” and my personal favorite, “I’m Just an Old Son of a Bum,” which has this lyric:
A college inquired once if I had been to YALE
Come give me that again, says I, did you say YALE or JAIL
Danielle Ferland as Little Red in the original Broadway production of Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods in 1987. Ferland will play The Baker's Wife in the Westport Country Playhouse/Baltimore Center Stage co-production of the musical this spring.
Westport Country Playhouse has announced who’s in its upcoming production of Sondheim & Lapine’s Into the Woods.
How do we all get to know this so far in advance of the May opening? Because the show’s a co-production, and opens in Baltimore next month.
Baltimore Center Stage, which has Into the Woods as the penultimate show of its current season, March 7-April 15, while Westport is using the fairy tale musical to open its 2012 season May 1-26.
The cast:
Jeffry Denman as The Narrator. On Broadway, Denman was in the original cast of The Producers (understudying Leo Bloom) and the final cast of Cats.
Jenny Latimer as Cinderella. Another veteran of the Les Mis 25th anniversary tour—Cosette herself!—Latimer is one of the only In the Woods folks with a prior Westport Playhouse credit; she was in Mark Lamos’ production of She Loves Me! last season, which she’s said in an interview was the first show she was ever in outside of her native Utah. (She auditioned for Les Mis while starring in She Loves Me.)
Justin Scott Brown as Jack. Brown’s from Avon, Ct., and was in the national tours of Spring Awakening (which played the Bushnell) and Les Mis (25th anniversary production).
Erik Liberman as The Baker. Liberman was the choreographer for Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, the Ibsen adaptation which played the Yale Rep in 2006. He’s been in workshops of the new play Paper Dolls, directed by Yale grad Mark Brokaw. His New York credits include Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (the Signature Theatre revival) and Harold Prince’s LoveMusik.
Danielle Ferland as The Baker’s Wife. Ferland went to high school in Stratford, Ct. and in her early teens appeared in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway. She won a Theatre World award as the original Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods on Broadway in 1987.
Alma Cuervo as Cinderella’s Stepmother and also The Voice of the Giant. Cuervo’s a 1976 Yale School of Drama grad and was Madame Morrible in the first national tour of Wicked, and later played the role on Broadway. She was in the PBS-TV Broadway Theatre Archive filming of classmate Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Women and Others, which co-starred another YSD classmate, Meryl Streep.
Nikka Graff Lanzarone as Cinderella’s stepsister Florinda. Lanzarone has been Velma Kelly in Chicago on Broadway and was Marisa in the Broadway musical of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
Eleni Delopoulos as Cinderella’s stepsister Lucinda. Delapoulos did a Eugene O’Neill Theater Center workshop, Tales from Ovid. In New York, she’s done Iphigenia at Aulis and was in the original cast of A Stoop on Orchard Street.
Cheryl Stern as Jack’s Mother. Stern was in the Hartford TheatreWorks production of No Way to Treat a Lady and the Long Wharf production of Joe Keenan’s musical The Times. In New York, she’s done the recent revival of La Cage Aux Folles and the star-studded Roundabout revival of The Women.
Dana Steingold as Little Red Riding Hood. Steingold was in the national tour of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and has done Little Red previously, in the production directed by Moises Kaufman at Kansas City Repertory Theatre.
Lauren Kennedy as The Witch. Kennedy played Emma Carew in the concert tour of Frank Wildhorn’s Jekyll & Hyde which played Mohegan Sun in 2004. On Broadway, she played Fantine in Les Mis and Lady of the Lake in Spamalot for a year each, and was an original cast member in the underrated 1997 musical Side Show.
Britney Coleman as Rapunzel’s Mother and Cinderella’s Mother. Coleman is known to millions of YouTube viewers as Bellatrix Lestrange in the cult hit A Very Potter Musical.
Jeremy Lawrence as The Mysterious Man. Lawrence has done biographical dramas in which he’s portrayed Tennessee Williams and Albert Einstein. How mysterious is that?—he’s an older guy with a white mustache.
Nik Walker as both The Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince. Walker is the co-founder of New York’s Burning Pony Theatre Company. He began his acting career in a Boston production of Sondheim’s Assassins.
Robert Lenzi as Rapunzel’s Prince. Lenzi was Seabee Billy Whitmore in Bart Sher’s Broadway revival of South Pacific in 2008.
I’m not seeing Cinderella’s father or grandmother on this list. Got to leave something to the imagination, I guess.
Quite the cast, huh? A delicate blend of the well-accomplished and the up-and-coming. And it’ll be interesting to see how this production squares with the rewrites and reinterpretations from the 2002 Broadway revival.
Go, Gocomics.com!And somebody really ought to do a dissertation sometime on the propensity for comic strips to reference live theater. (Seeing as comics and theater were the two preeminent popular art forms that ruled right up to the birth of electronic media, only to get pushed aside by radio & TV & movies & hi-fis, they must feel a mighty kinship.)
In today’s batch: Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha,Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy, Birdbrains by Thom Bluemel, Break of Day by Nat Fakes, Melissa DeJesus & Ed Powers’ beaky My Cage…
… and two different Bob the Squirrel gags by Frank Page.
It took me some time to dig deeply into the new Stephen King novel.
Sometimes his novels are one-weekend affairs (whatever the size—I remember whisking through The Tommyknockers at spacecraft-speed so I could share it with the rest of the family one Christmas vacation). Other times (as with 2010’s Under the Dome) I can dawdle over them for months. Full Dark No Stars I started lugging around as a library book and ended up finishing via an audiobook download on my iPod (despite the grating recitation of Jessica Hecht).
I read 100 pages of 11/22/63 before setting it back down for over a month.
Glad I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, because the remaining 749 pages have been a treat.
Not only does a key chapter occur on the actual day of my birth, 11/16/60, there’s a long tangent about the book’s time traveling hero, Jake Epping, directing a high school production of Of Mice and Men. It’s a lovely bit of sustained writing about how theater can change lives, wound in and out of Epping’s main preoccupation while stuck in the past: preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Stephen King is not a stranger to live theater. His Richard Bachman novel Rage (a book that was pulled out of print when its depiction of a high school student on a murderous rampage in his school began to lose fictional identity) was adapted into a stage play in 1989 by Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer mysteries. King is making his debut as a playwright this Spring at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta with The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a collaboration with songwriter John Mellencamp. Plus, of course, the Off Broadway revival of the much-lambasted 1988 Broadway musical based on King’s breakthrough horror novel Carrie is currently in previews and will open March 1.
In 11/22/63, King uses familiar elements of the high school theater experience without rendering them as High School Musical clichés. He explores the special circumstances of sports jocks becoming actors. He describes how a community relates to a play featuring townsfolk differently than it deals with a professional show from outside town. Epping’s (and King’s) understanding for layered stage drama extends to a disdain for superficial entertainments such as Arsenic and Old Lace—yet balances that with empathy for the well-timed and community-celebrating comedy revue. When illuminating the performances of the young actors, King presents their dialogue phonetically, giving you a glimpse of their speech patterns and put-on accents.
There are lines in the drama-club subplot which suggest that Stephen King missed his calling as a theater critic. Here, he describes opening night of Of Mice and Men, bringing in the personalities of the actors, the virtues of ensemble performances, and the magic of stage lighting:
The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the audience sat. George and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The other men had been sent away, but they wouldn’t be gone long; if the big, vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any dignity, George would have to see to it himself.
“George? Where them guys goin?”
Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and was gripping it. Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on her other side, Deke Simmons was staring up at the stage with his mouth slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur cropping grass in his north forty.
“Huntin. They’re goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie.”
Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor—what he was going to be, most likely, was a salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father—but a great performance can lift all the actors in a production, and that had happened tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved even low levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face was Steinbeck’s George Milton) had caught something from Mike. All at once, about halfway through Act I, he finally seemed to realize what it meant to go rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he had fallen into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his head, I thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
There’s several straight pages of evocative scene-setting like that. The play and the actors in it also underscore 11/22/63’s central themes of community, commitment and sacrifice.
I have often lamented that Stephen King has made too many of the protagonists in his many novels be novelists themselves. (Epping poses as one in this book, plus the entire 11/22/63 is written in his first-person voice). But I have also been encouraged that King hasn’t ever gone the cheap, ill-informed route that so many horror and crime novelists have, basing murder plots around egotistical actors or jealous movie stars or imperious directors or godlike producers. When he writes of performers, he humanizes them. When his characters have to get up onstage, whether it’s Carrie at the prom or mystery novelist Tess addressing a book club in Full Dark No Stars’ story “Big Driver” or mayors and ballplayers dealing with the media in Under the Dome and Blockade Billy, King can convey both the exhilaration and trepidation of these situations.
Yes, Stephen King is a master of suspense. And he gets that getting up in public is suspenseful.
Be sure to sit up close for any Great Small Works show. They’re both small-scale and in-your-face.
The progressive very-small-theater troupe, with New York radical roots and academic aplomb and great comic instincts, performs tonight (Friday, Feb. 3) and tomorrow (Sat. the 4th) at 8 p.m. in Wesleyan University’s CFA Hall, 287 Washington Terrace, Middletown. There’s a talkback following each performance. $15 general public; $12 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students.
The Great Small Works political puppetry troupe was officially formed and nurtured in New York City, but its Connecticut connections are just as strong. One of GSW’s founding members, Mark Sussman, attended Wesleyan University in the early 1980s. Early in the company’s history, it received back-to-back bookings at the then-new International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven. For the very first A&I fest in 1996, Great Small Works and dozens of community-minded Elm Citizens devised the oral history pageant A History of Apizza in New Haven. The following year, GSW returned with the tent-show spectacle Toy Theater Faust, a concise, creepy and comic rendition of the soul-selling saga. A few years later, the troupe brought one of its Toy Theater Festival presentations to the ECA Arts Hall.
A couple of years ago, GSW co-founder John Bell bagged one of the best academic gigs in American puppetry, Director of the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry. There on the UConn Storrs campus, Bell teaches and performs and curates exhibits and co-edits Puppetry International Magazine.
This is a provocative, envelop-pushing ensemble that also happens to be rooted in a great centuries-old tradition. Great Small Works challenges the idea of toy theaters as, well, toys, yet the shows are funny, entertaining and well-rounded as well as openly opinionated and socially aware.
At Wesleyan this weekend, Great Small Works will consist of five performers (John Bell, Cassandra Burrows, Trudi Cohen, Jenny Romaine and Xavier) doing the company’s signature piece Short, Entertaining History of Toy Theatre as well as the latest chapter in their torn-from-the-headlines series Toy Theater of Terror as Usual (Episode 12: Desert and Ocean), and the picture-narrative Three Graces—a cantastoria. The Graces in question turn out to be Grace Paley, Grace Kelly, Grace Jones and Grace Lee Boggs.
The Yale Cabaret has swapped the performance dates of two of the shows on their spring semester schedule. Funnily enough, they’re the two which stuck out from the sched already as being well-known works by world-famous American playwrights (amid the accustomed slate of obscurities and world premieres). Both scripts hail from the ’60s.
Flipping Kopit for Kennedy and vice versa, the Cabaret production of Arthur Kopit’s iconic feminist drama Chamber Music will play March 1-3, and the staging of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro originally planned for that slot will instead go where Chamber Music originally was to be, March 29-31.
Got that?
Here’s the remaining Spring semester:
Feb. 16-18: Mac Wellman’s Dracula, directed by Jack Tamburri.
Feb. 23-25: The ensemble piece Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend.
March 1-3: Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, directed by Katie McGerr.
March 8-10: The Yiddish King Lear by Jacob Gordin, directed by Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman.
March 15-1: No Cabaret show this week.
March 22-24: Underworld, directed by Ethan Heard.
March 29-31: Funnyhouse a Negro, directed by Lileana Blain Cruz.
April 5-7: No Cabaret show this week.
April 12-14: Carnival/Invisible, directed by Benjamin Fainstein.
My own fuller descriptions of the offerings, blogged in mid-December, are here.
New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas is of course a summertime affair. This year the omnicultural fortnight occurs June 16-30. But for the impatient, the fun begins in late wintertime with a series of A&I announcements and fundraisers.
One big event of the 2012 A&I festival is already known: a two-night stand of Shakespeare’s King Lear as staged by the Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan, June 28 & 29 at the Yale University Theatre. This event was leaked early because it also figures in the already-commenced semester-long Shakespeare at Yale celebration.
Contemporary Legend Theater’s Lear is performed in Mandarin with English supertitles. It incorporates Peking Opera staging conventions (that means lively and colorful and acrobatic) and features a live Chinese music ensemble. As for the cast, well, if you’re impressed that the current production of Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf makes do with just six actors, CLT does Lear with just one guy.
(I know you were thinking “This could be like Kurosawa’s Ran. But Ran’s take on Lear involved like a billion people and zillion zinging arrows. It’s OK. Go watch Ran again anyway.)
The show stars Wu Hsing-kuo, who leans heavily on the roles of the King and the Fool and also apparently interpolates his own comments into the performances. The piece has been around for a few years. It played the Brisbane Festival in Australia in 2008 and wowed the Edinburgh International Festival this past August, where London’s Financial Times critic Martin Hoyle praised it as “partly a class in theatre history, partly a hymn to the universality of dramatic art, entirely a love song to an ancient culture.”
Other highlights of Arts & Ideas 2012 will be announced at a “member preview party” March 27. The festival’s already looking beyond June, hosting a travel package to the Edinburgh Festival Aug. 9-14.
I cringe at the memory of begging my parents to buy me the overpriced “Advanced Fine Edition” of Kreskin’s ESP. For their hard-earned money, I got a pendulum (with cards marked “Finance,” “Travel,” “Career,” and “Love”—this is science?), a board, some ESP cards, and a pamphlet—all junk. The pendulum, moved (ideomotor effect, like Ouija boards) and the other stuff just didn’t work. My parents sat with me many evenings and we tried to get some results. We were wasting our time.
After several weeks of disappointing “experiments,” I stumbled across a book on “mentalism” (I think it was Dunninger) and realized Kreskin had duped me. I felt humilitated and betrayed. It wasn’t until I was 18 that Teller, James Randi, and Martin Gardner restored my love of science. Since then, a good part of my career has been dedicated to making sure others are not bilked by scumbags like Kreskin.
You really shouldn’t go without first reading about The Amazing Kreskin in one of the best celebrity memoirs of 2011: God, No! by Penn Jillette (Simon & Schuster).
The kick against Kreskin is that he doesn’t cop to being a mere illusionist, but instead suggests he has paranormal “mentalist” powers. There’s a whole school of magicians, such as Penn & Teller, who find such claims dangerous and unprofessional. Jillette, by reprinting the blistering letter excerpted above, then by describing a Kreskin performance which he attended in Las Vegas in 1994 (an anecdote which portrays the elder magician as dishonest and discourteous), establishes himself as the Amazing one’s foremost anti-fan.
Jillette also mocks himself, calling the Skeptical Inquirer letter the work of “an asshole” and describing the absurd lengths he’d go to in order to discredit and inconvenience Kreskin.”
Ultimately, Jillette’s account of the attacks and counter-attacks end up humanizing both himself and his “Amazing” antagonist.
On seeing The Amazing Kreskin in person, Jillette writes:
Wow. James Bond always has really cool, strong, smart villains. My nemesis was a thin, pathethic guy doing a matinee for six fully paid tickets, some twofers and bit of paper. I started to feel sorry for him It had been twenty-eight years since my parents bought me his shitty toy that I didn’t really need; maybe I could just get over it.
He doesn’t. Not much later in the narrative comes this deft appraisal: “Kreskin is a fucking weasel.”
Amazingly, that kind of makes me want to see Kreskin perform in Bridgeport. I guess I’m just not as jaded as Penn Jillette. Yet.
