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#21
Daily Threads / Re: Sunday, 20 October 2024
Last post by scenicdesign71 - Oct 24, 2024, 12:38 AM
Greenhouses and solaria and sunrooms always make me think of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady:


[A gnashing sound is heard from the conservatory.]

MRS. HIGGINS
Henry, please don't grind your teeth.


I probably wouldn't pay to see Sunset Blvd. again, but I might revisit it if a free ticket fell into my lap, especially if Scherzinger was on.  She wasn't last night, though in compensation I got to see Mandy Gonzalez instead, who was fantastic (and was reportedly being cheered on by someone named Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Big surprise (not): I think Green and Holdren, between them, pretty well hit all the nails on the head that were worth hitting.  I've seen two other productions of SB onstage: Lonny Price's 2017 B'way revival, with a skeletal unit set, a 40-piece onstage orchestra and Glenn Close reprising her Norma; and a traditional, if mediocre, 2011 staging at the summer theatre where I was designing Sweeney Todd at the time; plus a smattering of YouTube clips of all the major Normas, and one grainy full-length bootleg of Close's 1994 original.  Unfortunately, it's not a show that bears even that much repeat exposure, and after this one I may be all Sunsetted-out.

An observation: "we gave the world new ways to dream" is a great-sounding line, once.  Repeating it with minor variations ad nauseum all night long — including (but by no means limited to) making it both the title and the incessant refrain around which to build an entire song — invites scrutiny of the phrase's near-total lack of meaning; obliged to start supplying my own after its eighty-seventh reiteration, I couldn't help musing that our species has for decades been giddily racing toward extinction on a tide of delusional egomaniacs proffering "new ways to dream".  (By comparison, "I am/she is/was the greatest star of all," sung in a reverently ascending falsetto murmur, is so patently inane to begin with that it only gets funnier with repetition).  Despite its quartet of powerhouse performances and manifest willingness to subvert the material at least occasionally, even this production is stymied by those lines, leaving Ms. Gonzalez and David Thaxton to hammer away at them with numbing solemnity.  While director Jamie Lloyd allows us a few full-throated laughs at Norma's epic narcissism and Max's zombielike devotion, he never quite manages the central project of torpedoing the entire "dream factory" (and the culture at large) from which their respective obsessions arise, nor of denying them the dopey bathos in which ALW's score is singlemindedly determined to soak them.  In retrospect, I wonder whether it mightn't have been more effective to play the whole show as broad parody — on the extremely off-chance that Sir Andrew would have permitted such a thing — with moments of seriousness kept to a rigorously absolute minimum (i.e., brief; underplayed; only when they're least expected; and totaling no more than three, let's say) before yanking the rug out for the "animal... horror of the play's bloody finale," to borrow Holdren's phrase.  (Last night the ending was indeed hauntingly effective, staged — and played, by Gonzalez and Tom Francis — to the gut-churning hilt; but in retrospect, I'm still up in the air as to whether it accomplished much beyond upping the squirm factor a bit for 21st-century sensibilities — or whether that's enough).

We already knew that ALW only really has one approach to the topic of celebrity — slack-jawed fascination — and Lloyd, try as he might, may be unable to entirely resist that stance either.  (To quote Holdren once more, "despite their divergent aesthetics, both director and composer are Lloyds in search of effect.  They want an audience breathing hard, and they trust that feeling hard will follow; thinking hard is a distant third priority").  In any case, playing against this particular text, in a sustained manner, for two and a half hours (including intermission), would probably be a lot easier said than done; so it may well be that this slick but patchy update is the best we can hope for. 


#22
Daily Threads / Re: Sunday, 20 October 2024
Last post by KathyB - Oct 22, 2024, 09:58 AM
I want this badly. It's $330.

For some reason (probably user error) I can't insert the picture I want to.
#23
Daily Threads / Re: Sunday, 20 October 2024
Last post by DiveMilw - Oct 21, 2024, 07:27 PM
Bobster saw Sunset Blvd a few days ago and said he liked it; so much so that he would see it again.  (did I use the ; correctly?)
#24
Daily Threads / Re: 13 October 2024 Sunday
Last post by DiveMilw - Oct 21, 2024, 07:24 PM
Kathy, if you ever get to Sturgeon Bay, WI you should stay at the Holiday Music Motel which is owned by members of Timbuk 3.  It is a charming motel and their dog is often out and about.  They host several song writing events throughout the year and have an internet radio station, Steel Bridge Radio, where you can listen to songs made during them.  (Steel Bridge refers to the "famous" beautiful steel bridge which spans the canal connecting the West and East sides of the city.)
#25
Daily Threads / Re: Sunday, 20 October 2024
Last post by scenicdesign71 - Oct 21, 2024, 01:57 PM
I'm seeing Sunset Blvd. tomorrow night, and have been reading some of the reviews today.  There's a certain sameness: admiration for the flashily stripped-down production, and for Scherzinger's startlingly glamorous Norma, mixed with obligatory disdain for the show itself (as much, one suspects at this point, for the sin of its composer's name and resumé as anything else).  Many assume that director Jamie Lloyd's contemporary flourishes are meant to openly mock the purple material (by out-camping it?), and Green's not sure whether even that is enough to make it watchable ("[This] revival is not, like Cats: The Jellicle Ball this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it's a completely new way of not looking at one"). 

Once again, it's up to Sara Holdren — no fan of ALW, to be sure — to skip the rote Webber-bashing, take his opus more or less on its own terms without much need to pillory it afresh, and write intelligently about what's actually happening onstage at the St. James.  She earns my special affection for perceiving (as so few do, when it comes to this particular mode of tech-enhanced pseudo-austerity) that Lloyd's "seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing as it does millions of dollars".  Her review may ultimately be as mixed as Green's, even on some of the same grounds, but it tastes a bit fresher.

I have no particular love for the show myself (though its fidelity to Wilder's original screenplay gives it the minor distinction of being, by ALW's usual standards, a model of dramatic coherence).  But I look forward to seeing this production — and checking out the Ambassador Lounge, aka David Merrick's former office space, before the show.  Hopefully I'll be able to snap some pics of anything that looks like it might be original (I'm not holding my breath), and particularly of the view out over 44th St.

#26
Daily Threads / Sunday, 20 October 2024
Last post by KathyB - Oct 20, 2024, 07:01 PM
What I did this weekend:
1. Went to a symposium on Saturday morning. It was interesting in some parts and boring in others. This took care of breakfast and lunch.
2. Came home. Took a nap.
3. Went to a hockey game on Saturday evening, which turned out to be both the homecoming game and the game where they raised the championship banner from last season's Frozen Four.  ;D ;D ;D This took care of dinner.
4. Found out Patti LuPone is coming in May with some very inflated ticket prices.
5. Did a load of laundry on Sunday.
6. Ordered a hand mixer that was on my wish list at Amazon, because it was 25% off its normal price.
7. Found two new pairs of underwear that were chewed up.  :dog:
#27
The Work / Re: GYPSY, Broadway 2024
Last post by scenicdesign71 - Oct 18, 2024, 11:54 PM
I have other reasons (if, at this point, academic ones) for scouring the web for pictures of the Majestic's sign, but this would be a fun find even if I didn't:

https://www.instagram.com/broadwayupclose/reel/C6WRgBtKvMC/

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

To be less cryptic: the real reason I've been researching the Majestic lately — as part of a deep dive into the architectural history of the Broadway theatre district more generally — is because it would have been visible directly across the street from David Merrick's eighth-floor office window above the St. James Theatre when he was producing the original Gypsy.

The play I've been working on for the past few months (somewhat "on spec" for the time being), Ray Rackham's Raising Havoc, is set in Merrick's office, and from my very first reading of the script, I knew I wanted that window to offer the audience an expansive view of the neighborhood as it would have looked in 1959.  (The office itself later passed to Jujamcyn, and more recently to ATG, who have just finished converting it into a lounge for patrons of the St. James).

The play is structured around a series of imagined arguments between "the abominable showman" and June Havoc over her portrayal in Gypsy — which she hated, and which may be why that show ended up with the subtitle "a musical fable," preemptively acknowledging its decidedly casual relationship to the facts of the real Hovick family's lives; Ray, in turn, has tagged Raising Havoc "a comic fantasia".  While my intent for the design has never been documentary recreation of the office or its view, for me this project has become an object lesson in the much-touted design ideal of immersing oneself in the granular reality of a given time and place (read: f**k-tons of research) in order to make the best possible decisions as to how, and how much, to depart from that reality.  I've based many of the set's details on the few photos I've been able to find of the real Merrick's famously all-red office — his taste in décor seems to me to resonate usefully with the version of him Ray has fashioned — but its overall layout remains a mystery to me, and would likely be useless for stage purposes anyway.  Instead, in much the same way that the script adopts the keen wit and snappy repartee of showbiz comedies of the period, I've tried to create a sort of valentine to 1950s Broadway box-set design, with its splayed walls, forced perspectives, and fanciful show portals.

One of the few very basic things I've been able to ascertain about the groundplan of Merrick's real office is that there are seven north-facing windows on that floor, including a pair of circular ones at each end, which I love.  But all seven are very widely-spaced along the building's façade, and they seem too small to offer an audience, sitting 20-50 feet away, much of a view if I were to depict one or more of them in even vaguely-accurate scale and proportion.  Nevertheless, my research on the neighborhood so far has me increasingly convinced that, size notwithstanding, a north-facing window from Merrick's office probably really would have afforded someone in the room, standing at the window, just about the best — and most dramatically-useful — view out onto the heart of the theatre district that one could hope for: Merrick's "factory floor," as I like to think of it.  I'll probably still have to "edit" that view in order to perfect its overall composition, to achieve the right blend of realism and stylization, and, most likely, to find a workable and effective balance of 3D sculpture and projection.  But for now, with the help of half a dozen city maps and hundreds of photos covering the past 120 years or so — not to mention blogs and Wikipedia entries and landmark-status designations and the rest of the internet — I've begun CAD-modelling the 1959 midtown-west skyline to scale, and researching all the nearby building cornices, rooftop signage, water towers etc., so as to begin from as accurate a reconstruction as I can muster of that specific view, from that specific building, in that specific year.  Then the editing can begin.

Our wonderful director, Kris Cusick, has helped me see the need not to get so buried in Broadway-history geekery that the play's world becomes inaccessible to 21st-century viewers.  His experience with David Zinn's all-red set for the 2018 B'way Boys in the Band revival — and my own memories of Tony Walton's red set for the original Six Degrees of Separation — led me to a somewhat sparer, more modern aesthetic which hopefully balances out my instinct for finicky historicism (and nostalgia for old-fashioned scenographic styles).  But the play and its milieu tap such a rich vein of Broadway lore that the question for me becomes not whether to include visual Easter eggs, but how many, how subtly, and which ones among hundreds of possibilities.  (If a hypothetical audience member who'd actually seen David Merrick's office in the 1960s were to look at my design and disagree with how I've used my research, so be it, but I wouldn't want them to assume that I simply hadn't done it.  And the neighborhood outside is so intimately familiar to so many regular Broadway theatergoers — including more than a few who've witnessed its evolution over decades — that I feel it's important to spend some time getting the view just right, even granting that "just right" won't, in the end, mean "perfectly accurate".  The point isn't to smother the stage in fussy, proudly-obscure look-I-did-my-research detail, but to make sure that every choice — even in the not-unlikely event of a much smaller, sparer production than the one I'm dreaming of — illuminates the play's world, and invites the audience into it).  Fortunately, Ray's script is so beautifully-constructed that it always pulls me back from getting lost in internet wormholes: I'm never uncertain about what story we're telling, and that guides all the myriad design decisions.

Currently this is all still "academic," as mentioned above, because I haven't yet heard of any producers ponying up to mount a full production of Raising Havoc.  Then again, the invited reading/backers' audition — with Charles Busch as June, Burke Moses as Merrick, and David Burtka and Maggie Wirth as their respective long-suffering assistants — was only a few weeks ago; so, while it would be nice to move fast and piggyback on some of AudraGypsy's buzz, it's still pretty early days.  In the meantime, my TV job wrapped the same day as our final reading, and after months of juggling, I finally have plenty of time on my hands — so I'm continuing to work on this design, even if only for my own amusement.

One of these days I do want to see if I can wangle a field trip to the new Ambassador Lounge — although, between renovations to the space itself and the incursion of skyscrapers into the view over the past 65 years, I don't expect to see much that Merrick would have recognized.  The top of the Majestic, and its sign (newly restored to its original firetruck-red), may be among the few visible remaining landmarks.


#28
The Work / Re: THE FROGS
Last post by scenicdesign71 - Oct 18, 2024, 05:14 AM
This audio recording of the original 1974 Yale Rep production has apparently been up on YouTube for almost seven years, but I just discovered it now. 


Given the pool acoustics ("the echo sometimes lasts for days..."), it's easy to miss a lot of words, but if one had the patience I suspect it wouldn't be too hard — and would certainly be helpful — to make a transcript (and/or to digitally clean up the sound for clearer audibility).  I don't currently have that patience (or audio expertise), but in light of its age and the circumstances under which it was made, this recording actually sounds better than I would have expected, especially through headphones.


#29
Daily Threads / 13 October 2024 Sunday
Last post by KathyB - Oct 13, 2024, 03:27 PM
I loved I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. I have renewed faith in the theatre. The next show I'm seeing is Avaaz, which is about Iranian New Year. I'm seeing it right after Election Day.

Last week I drove to King Soopers (1.25 miles away), went into the store and bought groceries. This is something I haven't been able to do since April. It could have gone better--I still don't feel entirely comfortable turning the wheel, especially on right turns, and I ended up placing another King Soopers order for delivery to cover all the stuff I couldn't find in the store, starting with Lay's Poppables. 

I love fall in Colorado. This week, high temperatures are forecast to be in the 70s, which is lovely weather for taking somebody out for a walk. :dog: I've got my office window open. (Of course, it could also snow at any time. We usually get dumped on at least once in October.)

My big profound thought of the day: I really like Timbuk 3--everything except their one big hit. Right now I'm listening to "Facts About Cats." I'm also partial to "Reverend Jack and His Roamin' Cadillac Church."
#30
The Work / Re: GYPSY, Broadway 2024
Last post by scenicdesign71 - Oct 11, 2024, 12:17 AM
I've been out of the loop this summer, but now that I've got some time to myself, I recently caught up on the Majestic Theatre renovations post-Phantom.  They were unveiled by McDonald, Wolfe and the Gypsy orchestra at a ceremony last month:



More photos here and here and here.  The contrast with PotO's enveloping Gothic atmosphere is striking, to put it mildly — newly-repainted exterior (and sign) very much included.  Covering all that black, inside and out, must have taken a buncha coats.