Kevin Spacey won a drama award recently for reviving London's historic Old Vic Theatre. He was given a special prize at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards "for bringing new life to the Old Vic."
Spacey took charge of the theatre in 2003 and began a series of acclaimed productions (including the recent revival of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow starring Spacey and Jeff Goldblum). The theatre is currently showing Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests.
On Tuesday, I took Quentin to see The 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I was nervous because the last time I took him to a play, Seussical, we had to leave at intermission (and I had bought good seats). He was only three at the time and actually did pretty well until his father put a piece of gum in his mouth and did not have another piece to offer Quentin. Three-year-old meltdown. I'm sure the cast still remembers us - as we exited the building with a three-year-old making more noise than any of them.
I was not worried about a meltdown this time but boredom. He loved it though. He laughed so hard I had to tell him to keep his voice down a few times. And there was no intermission even!
So I was studying the playbill and noticed that almost all of the actors now have Web site addresses listed under their names:
Roberta Duchak - Played Rona Lisa Peretti in the play but also has released her own CD recently. (Check out her music on MySpace or listen to samples on iTunes.)
Andrew Keenan-Bolger - Played Leaf Coneybear in the play. He's got a blog - with videos even. (And from reading his profile, we could trade iPods with no problem, but not many books...and just a few movies. Little Miss Sunshine is one of his favorites too. I agree.)
So that was two of the main cast with Web sites and blogs. Only two. In the entertainment industry. I thought it would have been at least 50%.
I did find some of the other cast members stealthly though. Here's Katy Boren's MySpace page. (She played Marcy Park.) Justin Keyes' Web site is here. (I'm not sure it's the same Justin Keyes, but I think so.) Vanessa Ray and her husband have been filming Marriage Under Construction for HGTV. (And last but certainly not least, Dana Steingold's MySpace page.)
Why I just spent an hour researching this...I know not why. Such is my life. The mystery. The wonder. The wasted hour online. ;)
The producers of an off-Broadway show, My First Time, are giving away free tickets to anyone who can demonstrate his or her chastity.
How do you demonstrate your virginal state? (Not to worry, ladies - not in the stirrups.) Producer Ken Davenport said a hypnotist would screen people standing in line for the free tickets to determine their status.
The "virgin" stunt serves the subject of the play, "which is to get people to talk about their first sexual experience, something that almost any person on the planet has in common, whether in the United States or Rome," Davenport said.
The show is based on a decade-old Web site that invites people to anonymously share their stories about losing their virginity.
"I still have the Metallica shirt he wore that night," one person wrote on the site. (My favorite so far is "I remember my first sexual experience. I was alone at the time." Isn't that old Woody Allen material? It sounds like it if it's not. It reminds me of when the Countess tells him he's a great lover in Love and Death and he says, "Thank you. I practice a lot when I'm alone." Maybe that's the connection I'm making.)
The human lie detector, Sebastian Black, describes himself as a mind reader and a psychic hypnotist. "He's a master of body language and tone of voice," Davenport said.
Davenport could not say how many actual virgins were likely to be admitted to the theater for Thursday night's opening.
"There are a limited number of 'virgin tickets' available," he said. "However, there are not that many virgins in New York City."
If you are not eligible for free tickets, you can always visit the Web site and rate your first time.
On Nov. 13, 2002 , playwright Suzan-Lori Parks decided to write a play every day for an entire year - nothing Shakespearean, just "whatever happened to fall out of the sky that day." The result is 365 Days/365 Plays - and the largest theatrical collaboration in U.S. theatre history, as this fall over 600 theatres will produce a week's worth of plays starting on Nov. 13, 2006 (of course).
The exercise, she reports, was "great fun. It was also like a puja, or an extended daily prayer, and kind of like walking a pilgrimage on my knees. It was wild and necessary and arduous and delicious." (To see samples of the plays, which are typically just a page or two, click here.)
The first time Isabel Bayrakdarian heard an opera she was 17 years old. Her thoughts on Strauss's Ariadne auf Noxos? "I thought, I could probably do better," she tells Catherine Hong in W magazine (Feb. 2006). I like this girl! ;)
She had sung only in church and had taken no vocal lessons - but, it seems, she was definitely right. The 31-year-old Canadian-American is considered among opera's important talents already, landing such plum roles as Susanna, Zerlina and Rosina. She has performed on most of the world's major stages and has even sung in Elvish. (She performed on the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.)
An interesting career path for a women with a biomedical engineering degree from the University of Toronto. (She entered the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1997 on a lark. "I did it for fun," she tells Hong of her decision to compete against nearly 2,000 others - most of which had studied at music academies.)
Three years after her Met triumph, she won Placido Domingo's high-profile singing competition, the Operalia - and since then, the world has been her oyster. If you want to check her out for yourself, she will appear at the Chicago Lyric Opera on Feb. 25 for Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and in June she will make her debut at London's Royal Opera House.
Harry Connick, Jr., is making his Broadway debut in The Pajama Game. He plays Sid Sorokin, the foreman at the Sleep-Tite pajama factory, where workers aret striking for a seven-and-a-half-cent-an-hour raise. Now he can add Broadway actor to his growing list of accolades: recording artist, producer, jazz and blues pianist, film actor. (Though he's never starred in a Broadway musical, he did write the score to Thou Shalt Not.)
The show will be directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. Buy tickets here.
In January 1856, Margaret Garner and her husband fled the Kentucky farm where they were slaves. They were captured, and Margaret Garner killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife rather than let her return to slavery. The story was the basis for Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. As Detroit Public Radio's Celeste Headlee reports, it debuted in 2004 as an opera, Margaret Garner, with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role. Morrison wrote the libretto, collaborating with Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour. (And it was the first opera for both of them.)
Three opera companies - the Michigan Opera Theatre, the Cincinnati Opera and the Opera Company of Philadelphia - co-commissioned the work. It debuted in Michigan, moved to Cincinnati last summer and is now slated to open in Philadelphia on February 10, 2006. Several more U.S. opera companies have already put Margaret Garner on their schedules. Tickets are available online.
PBS has an interesting interview with Morrison about the opera.
The Lord of the Rings, the first major stage adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic trilogy, will receive its World Premiere when it opens in Toronto in Spring 2006. This coincides with the 70th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien starting to write the trilogy and follows the 50th anniversary of the publication of the complete trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King.
The $27 million production has book and lyrics by Shaun McKenna & Matthew Warchus and music by A.R. Rahman & Värttinä with Christopher Nightingale. The show will be directed by Matthew Warchus, with choreography by Peter Darling and set and costume design by Rob Howell.
Director Matthew Warchus says of the production, "We have not attempted to pull the novel towards the standard conventions of Musical Theatre, but rather to expand those conventions so that they will accommodate Tolkien's material. As a result, we will be presenting a hybrid of Text, Physical Theatre, Music and Spectacle never previously seen on this scale. To read the novel is to experience the events of Middle-earth in the mind's eye; to watch the films is to view Middle-earth as though through a giant window. Only in the theatre are we actually plunged into the events as they happen. The environment surrounds us. We participate. We are in Middle-earth."
The play will open at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre on March 23, 2006, following previews from February 2. Tickets are on sale to the public at www.lotr.com.
The London premiere is scheduled for fall of 2006.
