I’ve come to feel that if I can’t make something happen in under an hour and a half, it’s not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
Category Archives: theater
lost Meyerhold-intended Prokofiev music
For NYC’ers, the music premieres Tuesday night. More: “The music is part of a 1939 composition, which didn’t see the light of day again until 2004, when a facsimile of Prokofiev’s manuscript was published. It’s one of several pieces Yale faculty, alumni and students will perform Tuesday night. Berman says Music for Athletic Exercises was written to be performed on a grand scale.
“There was a project of putting on a huge athletic pageant on the Red Square in Moscow in the summer of 1939, which would involve thousands of athletes from all over the Soviet Union,” he says.
Berman explains that V.E. Meyerhold, a famous Russian director, was hired to stage this extravaganza, but one morning he didn’t show up to work on the piece.
“Nobody could find him,” Berman says. “He was arrested, as was the habit in these years of the Soviet history. He was arrested, imprisoned and subsequently shot to death.”
Traumatic as it was, Prokofiev finished the piece.”
the way to go to the city
is like this. Fly-by-visitor. Businthemorning: food: theater: more food: friends far too long missed and most dearly revisited: and back in Baltimore before midnight via yetanotherbus. If you go for less than a day, no suitcase required! I got to walk around with the lightest bag I have ever carried in Manhattan. I bought four books at Biography-soon-to-be-BookBook in the Village, all of them bought to give away, saw Donald Margulies’s new play at MTC, TIME STANDS STILL, with Laura Linney (very, very good: it’s nice to see theater so spot-on that you cry before intermission) and ate some of the most enormous latkes that have ever been conceptualized, as well as chocolate croissants and Cantonese food with lotus roots. They (the lotus roots) look like tomatoes, taste like water chestnuts, and behave like pinwheel pasta. You must, as soon as you can, see both Laura Linney and the lotus root.
he’s a what? he’s a what? he’s a…
…Music Man!
Long post here. For those of you who have asked me what the musical theatre lyrics course will include, here is a class-by-class breakdown. I am heavily indebted in this material to the website Musicals101.com, maintained by John Kenrick, and particularly his lengthy article on the connection between gay culture and musical theatre. He writes from a perspective that combines scholarly knowledge with personal opinion. It’s fun to read.
I am still making changes but things are starting to become more final. The first week is (mostly) about lyrics, the second week is more about history and representation, and the third week, which only has two classes, is an in-depth study of one lyricist: Howard Ashman. Hopefully we can use Ashman to sum up everything we’ve looked at before, and also address the idea of musicals and animation.
When I started working this up, I wanted it only to be about lyrics, but that turned rapidly into an all-white-men-fest, and a rehash of the first fifty years of the last century. So this version of the course is, hopefully, broader, and more relevant to contemporary practice.
Each week they have to write one set of lyrics, which receives a small-group workshop with five other students on the last day of the week. I am debating about having all of them work from the same source text (Harry Potter: The Musical? Star Wars: The Musical?) or letting them choose their own sources. I want them to come out of this thinking of themselves as lyricists in the Gilbert model – able to write the lyrics without the composer, and present something to the composer. They all have to write one chorus, one duet or solo, and one song which combines solo characters with choruses, I think. Either that, or they all have to write one ballad, one tells-a-story song, and one chorus or medley…
I’m still deciding.
Day One: (God help me.)
Introduction to the course.
I’m going to go around the room and ask everyone what their favorite / first musicals were, and favorite songs from those. We will then try to divide those songs into formal groups, including both thematic and structural categories;
– ballad (AABA)
– duet
– medley
– chorus
– dance number
– messenger speech / “Let me tell you how it happened…”
– dramatic monologue
– recitative
– patter song
and so forth.
I will explain that the goal I have for them, as writers, in this course, is to be able to critically analyze different types of song lyrics, identify what types of lyrics they are, and produce versions of those lyrics themselves. Secondly, I want them to have some more ideas about both the history of the form, and its political implications.
Terms: Lyricist, librettist, book, composer, orchestrator/arranger (Shall We Dance example) etc.
Then we will discuss what a musical is, the origins of the term, the first musicals, first musicals in the United States, etc.
Discuss: Why are musicals so popular? (John Kenrick) Why are people willing to pay five hundred dollars a ticket for them? What are some of the problems with musicals? Why do so many people hate them? What are the worst musicals? What makes them so bad? Introduce theme of representation in musicals, and of stereotypes. Introduce theme of queer culture and musicals. Discuss course’s bifurcated approach between New Criticism (focus on lyrics as lyrics) and historical / socioeconomic criticism. Best of both worlds.
We’ll do a “name some of-the-moment popular musicals” brainstorming. Contemporary manifestations of the musical: HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL(s), Urinetown, [title of show], Spring Awakening, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Proposition 8:The Musical, Joss Whedon, and the musical episode of Buffy, among others. RENT and the problem with RENT. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cats. The jukebox musical: Across The Universe, Abba. The take-songs-and-rewrite-lyrics musical: Moulin Rouge, John Gay…
Where do musicals come from? I will use this point to deliver a short but impassioned speech on the Greek chorus (surprise). We’ll look at some Greek choruses as “song lyrics” and talk about how they map onto contemporary song categories. Segue into a discussion of the form’s origins in operetta.
This leads us, of course, to Gilbert and Sullivan. We’ll listen to excerpts of PINAFORE and PIRATES and do some analysis of those lyrics. And then begin watching TOPSY-TURVY, the Mike Leigh film on the making of THE MIKADO. If, as I suspect, we do not get to TOPSY-TURVY on this day, we can at least catch up on day two.
Day Two: Continuation of Gilbert unit. I am going to have to explain a lot about 1885-era Europe. I have friends who have seen this movie who were put off by it, early, by Leigh’s depiction of topless Parisian prostitutes with Sullivan, and stopped taking the rest of the film seriously — or who watched it but didn’t understand all the British history stuff. I’m either going to judiciously fast-forward so that we (mostly) watch only the production-related parts, or else pause a lot to discuss things.
Day Three: Sondheim. We’ll watch most of WEST SIDE STORY (which segues into the next class on race and ethnicity and the musical) and listen to lots of excerpts: definitely ASSASSINS, COMPANY, PACIFIC OVERTURES. Sondheim as the heir to Gilbert. Lyrics.
Day Four: Class “socioeconomic status groups,” race, ethnicity, representation, and the American musical. Vaudeville, minstrel shows. Musicals and war/jingoism. We’ll watch parts of SOUTH PACIFIC and FINIAN’S RAINBOW, THE WIZ, HAIR, CAROUSEL, THE SOUND OF MUSIC and PORGY & BESS.
Day Five: Gender, sexuality, queer culture, camp/cult/transgressive musicals. THE WIZARD OF OZ. Judy Garland. VICTOR/VICTORIA. ROCKY HORROR. HEDWIG. Since this is a Baltimore-themed class, the film we’re going to watch the most of is HAIRSPRAY: but this day is also going to cover the dance musical, including portions of GREASE and A CHORUS LINE, and address the issues with representation of queer people and AIDS in RENT. Sadly, this ties in to the upcoming Howard Ashman unit in a painful way, since he died of AIDS early in his career.
Day Six: Yiddish theater / Jewish culture and the American musical: briefly treating FIDDLER and the many Jewish lyricists of the genre, before spending most of the day on THE PRODUCERS and Mel Brooks and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN in preparation for our field trip to see the YF musical.
Days Seven & Eight: The musical and animation. The Disney tradition. The move away from animated musicals with the move to 3D animation. Address puppets, Muppet Show, Jim Henson, AVENUE Q. Howard Ashman: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, THE LITTLE MERMAID. Conclusion of course.
I’m having a lot of fun here, if you can’t tell.
and if I say to you tomorrow
Working on the intersession course on musical theater. We’re going to watch films and write lyrics and imitations: the lyricist is the lens for most of the interpretation. It starts on January 4th, and runs the 4th-22nd, before spring semester commences. My class is full. I’m very interested to see what kind of students have signed up for it.
not to be abed after midnight
I might as well leave you with Toby and Andrew for the hiatus. I have been writing a poem about Twelfth Night. Writing poems about plays is, I suppose, like composing music about music. But I like it. Anyway, I hope these gentlemen take better care of you, SOS, than I have been since coming here. They are great fun to drink with, although a little repetitive. (R&G, anyone?) You say honestly. Rest you merry.
TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT II, SCENE III. OLIVIA’s house.
Enter SIR TOBY BELCH and SIR ANDREW
SIR TOBY BELCH
Approach, Sir Andrew: not to be abed after
midnight is to be up betimes; and ‘diluculo
surgere,’ thou know’st,–
SIR ANDREW
Nay, my troth, I know not: but I know, to be up
late is to be up late.
SIR TOBY BELCH
A false conclusion: I hate it as an unfilled can.
To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is
early: so that to go to bed after midnight is to go
to bed betimes. Does not our life consist of the
four elements?
SIR ANDREW
Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists
of eating and drinking.
SIR TOBY BELCH
Thou’rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.
Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!
here we go again
The show leaves audiences feeling something important has been said, even if it hasn’t.
– Stephen Holden in the NYT on KRISTINA, the new (arrgh) “poperetta” from the Abbans.
never have I ever
directed a play…
I am going through three boxes of scary files that have not been sorted. I bought something that looks like an able seaman’s chest, or some Western debutante’s Trunk, off the street where I live, and am filling it with properly alphabetized production documents. This is only reminding me of my age. I didn’t remember that I did the choreography for Don Giovanni…or AD’d a production of Frankenstein (the classical music version)…or…so many things.
I’ve been doing this for ten years, after all. Ten years. L once told me I needed to make a list of every production I’d ever done, because otherwise I would forget. I thought that was absurd. How can you forget something that takes so much work? But she was right.
Seeing these old files is like seeing a slide show of my past. Or reading a biography of someone whose work I like, but who I don’t know that well. The things I have done are now so far away that they seem detached from me. AVW and BH might as well have been directed by another person. I know I did it, but I don’t know how I did it! And I don’t know if I could do it again!
Also, I found a file of my old Stanford papers, one of which is about Bovary, and uses the word “Epist-Emma-Ology” in the title. Ha ha.
My writing, when I was in school, was insufferably arrogant. I don’t know that my writing has changed that much since then, or my ego, but I will say that reading these papers, written before I had learned how to spell “humility,” let alone possess it, makes me laugh. Some of the writing is awful. Some is okay. But all the papers, well written or not, are confident to the point of exploding.
enter, with tigers
Yesterday, I did some research for J’s CYRANO at the library. She was perplexed by a stage direction in the Burgess translation that reads:
Onto the stage comes a coach, with drivers and tigers
for Roxane’s act 4 entrance. I went through a whole bunch of other translations and the original, looking for another reference to the tigers, but couldn’t find any. It must be a production-specific thing.
I then went to Trivia at the Wharf Rat again. Met one of the WS folks’ friends, a woman who teaches English in a Baltimore public high school. She was sharing horror stories about teaching in a converted wood shop with no air conditioning.
After Trivia, I listened to two of the people I was there with, friends for the past two or three years, tell stories about the program, how they became friends, etc. One of them is leaving in a few days. The city and the atmosphere around this program are both very seductive, and I think a lot of people keep staying on for quite awhile, for that reason. But he thinks it’s time for him to go.
I always like to listen to stories like that, because two people tend to have different memories of how, exactly, they met in the first place. When I think about it, I can’t even remember how I met these guys, and I’ve only known them for a couple of weeks. I believe it was at a party. But we were somewhere else before that, and I don’t know where.
I’m writing a poem based on Trivial Pursuit answers.
Yes, And.
The Harry Potter / Laurel, MD / DC / Capitol Fringe / Our Mutual Friend extravaganza was fabulous. And then I came home and I did what I always do when things are going well, which is cook enough food for the whole week, all in one day.
Today, I got to observe a section of the creative writing class I will be teaching in the fall, and then had lunch with the teacher, one of my cohort (fiction, not poetry.) It was really helpful.
And then I found the practice rooms and the rehearsal rooms. So large, so beautiful. A night-black Yamaha grand, in a room bigger than some rooms I’ve lived in, with dark blue walls and a dark yellow curtain on one side.. It could have been the rehearsal room for a PBS special.
I played scales like a trash compactor collapsing – starting at the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle and then going back out. And then I played and played and played until my hands started hurting.
You know what I realized about piano, today? I have always had such a hard time personificating/anthropomorphizizizing the piano. It’s too big, and too mechanical. It’s not a he, or a she. It’s not a living creature, to me, which makes it very difficult for me to connect with it. I think at the times when I have quit piano, I have been caught up in this. I have felt like the instrument resisted connecting with me as I wanted it to.
But I realized, today – maybe it took playing a grand again to realize it, so enormous – the piano is not a human. The piano is a location – like a basketball court, or a track, or a theater. You can love it, but you just have to realize it’s not a person.
To love playing it, the person you have to love is the composer, or the singer, or your self. You can’t love the instrument, any more than you can love a football field. You can only love the music. The game. You just have to get out there and run, every day, and eventually you love yourself running.
And I wrote a poem today that I like. It is about theater. I think that everything I write is going to be about theater. This will stop me from having this same conversation about “Am I doing X or Y?” all the time. I am doing both.
Dara Weinberg 