A Must!

THAT SIDE OF THE SHADOW

 I have to take advantage of the fact that I am writing a blog, even if on theater, to promote hard work.  Some fellow American Academy of Dramatic Arts-Los Angeles alums have written, directed and starred in an incredibly captivating work in film.  I am so excited and inspired by the dedication and time that these creative folks have put into this project, and to see it getting rave reviews and be a finalist in the Big Break Movie Contest is something to be said.

Read the reviews from the Santa Barbra Film Festival
by Jim Burns
by Tim Lopez

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER & VOTE FOR THAT SIDE OF THE SHADOW.  IF THEY WIN, THEIR FILM WILL BE SHOWN IN AMC THEATERS!  SUPPORT THE ARTS AND UP AND COMING FILM MAKERS!!  DO YOUR PART!
http://www.thatsideofashadow.com
follow them on facebook!

Musical Highlight

Wonderland on Broadway

Discover Broadway's spectacular and exhilarating new musical... WONDERLAND.  An exciting new spin on the classic story of Alice and her Looking-Glass World, WONDERLAND is about a modern-day woman who goes on a life-changing adventure far below the streets of New York City, where a marvelous cast of familiar characters help her rediscover what's really important. Featuring a fresh, contemporary pop score from the creator of Jekyll & Hyde, WONDERLAND arrives on Broadway this spring following a sold-out, two-city national premiere.


Previews in New York begin March 21 and the show opens April 17 at the Marquis Theatre.

Books to Read

True and False Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

One of our most brilliant and iconoclastic playwrights, screenwriters, and directors takes on the art and profession of acting, in a book that is as shocking as it is practical, as witty as it is instructive, and as irreverent as it is inspiring.  David Mamet -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Oleanna -- takes a jackhammer to the idols of contemporary acting, from acting schools to "sense memory", from "interpretation" to "The Method". He shows actors how to undertake auditions and rehearsals, how to deal with agents and directors, how to engage audiences, and how to stay faithful to the script. Bracing in its clarity, exhilarating in its common sense, True and False is invaluable.

Playwright Pick

Christopher Shinn

With numerous awards won over a course of 10 years, whose first play, Four  was produced at the Royal Court Theater at the tender age of 22, he is forced to be reckoned with.  The 34 year old play write from Connecticut ,  has a prolific writing style.  His play, Dying City, first produced in 2008, is about an Iraq War widow who is visited by her dead husband’s twin brother. It deals with war, betrayal, love, torture, child abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Ben Brantley of the New York Times described the play as an “unsettling study of domestic sadism and subterfuge” that “brought the war home.  


When on the Daily Show, John Stewart asked him what sparked his idea of the play, Shinn replied, "I try to structure my plays intuitively because, at the deepest level, any work of art represents the movements of the psyche in grappling with trauma. We do not plot out our sufferings in a logical manner in real life—we merely suffer.

The play was structured like a trauma, and the trauma was disguised in three characters. It looked at the profound questions about the links between sexuality, violence, deceit and the truth. I wanted the work to inflict a trauma on the audience—to be something they’d have to struggle with rather than passively experience."

His newest play, Picked, is about a young actor whose life undergoes radical change when he is chosen to star in a big-budget Hollywood action movie. Think of “Entourage,” but with an emphasis on psychology, not sex. Michael Wilson directs. (April 20, Vineyard Theater)

Playwright Pick

So, I came across this slide show from NY Times.  Photos of stage productions from the Late Great Tennessee Williams genius mind.  His plays were what pushed my love for the theater into the depths of my heart.  As a freshman in college I had no idea what I got myself into when cast as Charlotte in Night of the Iguana.  Changed my path, popped my bubble.  These photos remind me of all those not so well known plays of his, and how provocative he was.  Thanks NY TIMES!!!  Tennessee Williams slideshow CLICK HERE

Show Info

What to see in New York

Good People

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St.
New York, NY 10036

Now in Previews                                             

Show Opens:
March 3, 2011
Show Closes:
April 24, 2011

Ticket Price: $57.00-$116.00

Tickets by Phone: 212-239-6200

http://www.mtc-nyc.org

Synopsis

Welcome to Southie, a Boston neighborhood where a night on the town means a few rounds of bingo... where this month's paycheck covers last month's bills... and where Margie Walsh has just been let go from yet another job. Facing eviction and scrambling to catch a break, Margie thinks an old fling who has made it out of Southie might be her ticket to a fresh new start. But is this apparently self-made man secure enough to face his humble beginnings? Margie is about to risk what little she has left to find out.With his signature humorous glow, Lindsay-Abaire explores the struggles, shifting loyalties and unshakable hopes that come with having next to nothing in America.

Fat Pig 

Belasco Theatre 111 West 44th Street New York, NY 10036 Previews Start: April 12, 2011 Show Opens: April 26, 2011 Open Run Ticket Price: $51.50 - $129.00 Tickets by Phone: 212-239-6200 800-432-7250 http://www.fatpigonbroadway.com Synopsis This razor-sharp comedy tells the story of Tom (Josh Hamilton), a  very eligible bachelor who falls for the beautiful, bright and plus-sized Helen (Heather Jane Rolff). Tom is overjoyed with his new relationship but his shallow co-workers are less enthusiastic. Tom shrugs off their objections but eventually the cruel jabs of his acerbic friend Carter (Dane Cook) and Jeannie (Julia Stiles), a former flame, force him to question his own values and the importance of conventional good looks. The bitingly funny Fat Pig is playwright Neil LaBute's candid and unapologetic depiction of our obsession with image and cookie cutter beauty.

Theater News

Spidey on Broadway

With a record 66 preview performances, the hype surrounding this expensive production has somewhat ruined it before it officially opens.  The show was suppose to open on the 7th, instead it has been pushed back to March, but that did not stop the critics.  They had nothing nice to say today and it has taken over the blogisphere.   It has been called by some to be the worst musical of all time proclaiming the music, by Bono and Edge from U2, forgettable. Acclaimed director Julie Taymor and the U2 crew are defending the project by saying changes are still in the works and any critic is invalid.

Here are the reviews, if you don't have time to read them all click here to watch quick video of highlights

New York Times: “The sheer ineptitude of this show, inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from “How can $65 million look so cheap?” to “How long before I’m out of here?”

New York Post: “A snowballing budget, broken bones, a concussion, multiple delays, rewrites — and what do we get? An inconsistent, maddening show that’s equal parts exciting and atrocious.”

New York Daily News: “Except for the anthem ‘Rise Above,’ songs by Broadway rookies Bono and the Edge of U2 lack hooks to make them stand out. As if written in invisible ink, tunes are there and then slip from your mind.”

Newsday (subscription required): “When I saw the show in December, the story was scattered, the music shockingly mediocre. But Taymor’s stage pictures were amazing, and the flying was fun in a dumb, circus-y way. With the composers due back from their tour and safety issues more or less solved, it seemed likely that the show could be pulled together into an unusual, if not important, entertainment hybrid Taymor calls a ‘rock and roll circus drama.’ Yet, the show I saw Saturday night was the same bloated, muddled, often beautiful mess it was before all this supposed ‘work.’”

New York magazine: “It’s by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar. But never, ever boring.”

Bloomberg: “After all this expenditure of talent and money, ‘Spider-Man’ is probably unfixable because too much has gone into making humans fly, which is not what they are good at. It imitates poorly what the ‘Spider-Man’ movies do brilliantly with computer graphics — and without putting live actors in jeopardy.”

Chicago Tribune: “The much-told woes of ‘Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark’ boil down to a problem that has similarly ensnared far humbler new musicals: an incoherent story. For without a book with consistent rules that a mainstream audience can follow and track, without characters in whom one can invest emotionally, without a sense of the empowering optimism that should come from time spent in the presence of a good, kind man who can walk up buildings and save our lousy world from evil, it is all just clatter and chatter.”

Hollywood Reporter: “There’s one thrillingly beautiful image about ten minutes in — during a song appropriately titled ‘Behold and Wonder’ — as aerialists suspended from saffron-colored sashes weave an undulating fabric wall that fills the stage. And the impressive speed and agility of the flying sequences is a major leap forward in action terms from the slow glide of ‘Mary Poppins.’ But mostly, Spider-Man is chaotic, dull and a little silly. And there’s nothing here half as catchy as the 1967 ABC cartoon theme tune.”

Los Angeles Times: “To revise a handy little political catch phrase, ‘It’s the storytelling, stupid.’ And on that front, the failure rests squarely on Taymor’s run-amok direction.”

Variety (subscription required): “The performers are somewhat smothered by effects. Jennifer Damiano, late of ‘Next to Normal,’ stands out as the embattled heroine; Matthew James Thomas, on as standby to leading man Reeve Carney, was perfectly likable. Otherwise, only Michael Mulheren manages to break through the material.”

Washington Post: “What’s apparent after 170 spirit-snuffing minutes in theFoxwoods Theater — interrupted by the occasional burst of aerial distraction — is that director Julie Taymor, of ‘The Lion King’ fame, left a few essential items off her lavish shopping list:

1. Coherent plot
2. Tolerable music
3. Workable sets

To be sure, Taymor has found a way to send her superhero soaring above the audience. And yet, the creature that most often spreads its wings in the Foxwoods is a turkey.”

Playwright Pick

Christopher Hampton

Christopher Hampton is a playwright, screenwriter, director and producer. Born in 1946 in Portugal, he spent his childhood in Aden, Egypt and Zanzibar, then studied French and German at Oxford University. He was the youngest writer ever to have a play staged in the West End, and in the late 1960s, was resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre.

His own stage plays include When Did You Last See My Mother (1966), performed at The Royal Court Theatre,  Total Eclipse (1968) about the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine; the comedy The Philanthropist (1970); Savages(1974) and Treats (1976).

His screenwriting credits include translations of classics such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House(1970); Tales from the Vienna Woods (1977) and Moliere’s Tartuffe (1984), and his television work includes The History Man for the BBC, The Ginger Tree (1989) and Tales from Hollywood (1989).

In 1985 he wrote the play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted and translated from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, and later adapted this as a screenplay. The resulting film,Dangerous Liaisons,  was an international success and won many awards.  He also wrote and directed Carrington, about the relationship of Lytton Strachey with the painter, Dora Carrington.

Other work includes translations of Yasmina Reza’s work for the stage, and further versions of Chekhov and Odon von Horvath.  He wrote the stage adaptation and co-wrote the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, and the recent screenplay for the BAFTA nominated film, Atonement.