Streaming Theatre

[scenicdesign71]

NYT article about Arlekin Players and The Orchard:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/theater/arlekin-players-theater-the-orchard.html

Runs June 7 - July 3, in-person ($39-125) and streaming ($29), plus fees.
(Not sure about the fees for in-person tix, but the streaming option seems to carry only a single, refreshingly modest-as-these-things-go $1.65 "convenience fee" bringing the total to 30 bucks and change).

The opening has been pushed forward a week from the originally-announced May 31 due to Covid cases in the company.  Sending positive thoughts to Arlekin and the affected company members.

[scenicdesign71]

[scenicdesign71]

For at least a decade before SJS's death, I have from time to time wondered who would end up playing him in the inevitable posthumous solo play, and --more queasily still, at the time -- when.

Barely a year after, it turns out, though my vague sense of Hershey Felder's works -- admittedly sight unseen, thus far -- is that it might be a slight stretch to call them plays (or, in the Covid-streaming era, movies).

Regardless: Felder is, to no one's surprise, doing a Sondheim thing this December.  (Streaming tickets here; they want you to purchase the entire streaming "season", including pieces about Chopin, Liszt, Verdi and Mozart, among others; but as far as I can tell, that ticket link is just for the Sondheim "Premiere Musical Film Event" on December 18, plus a week of on-demand access... all for a mere $50).

[scenicdesign71]

54 Below is livestreaming their ninth annual Sondheim-themed Halloween cabaret, "Into Sweeney Todd's Woods," tonight at 7pm ET.

(I've long gotten the impression that 54B's programmers aim for a certain soft-edged "unfussy" wit, let's just say, when it comes to titling these things.  I guess it's part of their brand, though it's probably also played a very minor role in keeping me away from their house-blend performances for lo this past decade-plus.  Someday I suppose I'll finally make it to one of their "Sondheim Unplugged" evenings or something.  Heaven knows, living here, and especially after the lost pandemic year without live-in-person entertainment of any kind, I ought to show some gratitude for the existence of a place like 54B -- one of very few remaining venues of its kind,  however tourist-ified -- and should go there more often than once every few years).

This year's edition features Stephen DeRosa and Kerry O'Malley (Into the Woods 2002) and Sarah Rice (Sweeney Todd OBC), among many others. 

$25 plus a $3.50 "ticketing fee", livestream only (this won't be, or remain, or become, available afterward for viewing on demand).

https://54below.com/events/livestream-into-sweeney-todds-woods-feat-stephen-derosa-sarah-rice-more

[scenicdesign71]

Speaking of reasons to visit 54 Below either in person or virtually, La LuPone is taking it over for the holidays, including a New Year's Day livestream.

$40 to stream (again: livestream-only, no on-demand), plus that $3.50 ticketing fee.

(By way of comparison: seeing the show here in person would, depending on date and seating location, set you back between two and three hundred bucks per person including fees, food and drink.  So, on balance, being able to see it for like 80% off that price, from home, in your jammies, sounds like a triple-win to me).

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[scenicdesign71]

Because The Importance of Being Earnest needed a sequel...

Streamable through Sunday 3/26, tickets at https://nyclassical.org/frank.  A $10-minimum donation gets you a link to stream the show as often as you like, whenever you like -- until 10pm Sunday (ET, I'm guessing?), after which the streaming link will no longer be valid.

I haven't seen it yet myself (I'll probably watch it tonight), but even mixed reviews can't entirely extinguish the appeal of Christine Pedi as Lady Bracknell.

[DiveMilw]

 The Fourth Messenger—
This is a concert version of a musical by Tanya Shaffer and Vienna Teng that reimagines the Buddha legend in a contemporary setting with a flawed female Buddha figure.  It was filmed at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[scenicdesign71]

Theatre in Quarantine:

Nosferatu, A 3D Symphony of Horror

Halloween 2023

[scenicdesign71]

Manual Cinema has begun production on a new piece:

"Part eco-fiction, part haunted-house tale, Future Feeling is our new short film about a family on the island of Nantucket bracing for a hurricane headed their way. As the storm comes closer and the power goes out, strange things begin to happen in the house that force the family to reimagine their relationship with nature and leaves them forever transformed in the process."

No release date has been announced yet.  But in the meantime, their work can also be seen in Goliath, the new Showtime documentary about Wilt Chamberlain.

MC's own website, incidentally, is looking more elegant than ever.  My one tentative quibble would be the use of all-caps headings and pull-quotes in a particularly playful display font whose capitals, specifically, make that choice a slightly iffy one for legibility.  But the overall organization, imagery and design of the site give it both an intuitive simplicity and a visual sumptuousness befitting their growing and well-deserved success.

[scenicdesign71]

Nosferatu will stream live from the TiQ closet for ten performances, October 27-31 at 7pm and 9pm each night.

Tickets (and 3D glasses) can be ordered here, $31 including fees.

[DiveMilw]

Nosferatu will stream live from the TiQ closet for ten performances, October 27-31 at 7pm and 9pm each night.

Tickets (and 3D glasses) can be ordered here, $31 including fees.



Oooo!!  Skirball!!  They have such interesting programming.  

[scenicdesign71]

Preoccupied by my own horrors, I missed TiQ's Halloween treat last week -- but it will reportedly be available on YouTube sometime early next year.  In the meantime, the NYT loved it:

Nosferatu, a 3D Symphony of Horror: A Lip-Smacking Scare (NYT Critic's Pick)

(Ed.:  As of February 2024, Nosferatu can be watched on YouTube in 2D here, or in 3D here.  The latter requires a pair of old-school anaglyph [red & blue] 3D glasses, which TiQ will send you for a $3 donation [through Fractured Atlas, instructions on the YouTube page], or they're easy to find online.

There is also a behind the scenes featurette which, Manual Cinema-style, frames the entire 37-minute livestream with two additional camera feeds simultaneously capturing the pinpoint "backstage" choreography.  There's a lot in this piece that you might easily assume was pre-recorded, but the featurette proves otherwise, showcasing TiQ's ingenuity and discipline, as well as their commitment to keeping even remote, digitally-mediated performance "live" in certain senses: it seems to be something of a house rule that "pre"recording, if any, can take place only during the livestream itself, to be looped back in later — sometimes scant seconds later — during that same performance).

[scenicdesign71]

...and speaking of MC:  They're at it again — this time in collaboration with another Chicago-based design studio incorporating digital 2D and 3D animation — in a six-minute phantasmagoria about a woman (and a world) on a deadline:

Manual Cinema + Span:  Countdown

MC's own upcoming short film Future Feeling is apparently still aiming for a festival release sometime this year, and their behind-the-scenes teaser photos continue to intrigue me.  The miniature sets -- Nantucket sand dunes, weather-vaned beach house, dramatic spiraling cotton-wool storm clouds -- look eye-wateringly gorgeous.

[scenicdesign71]

Posted on the Facebook "All Things Sondheim" group:

Playbill:  How PBS Captures Broadway Shows for Great Performances

"Many of the Sondheim musicals have been on public television.  And they were because Mr. Sondheim wanted them.  He would defer his cost to make the shows happen, to make his money hopefully, in the back end," explains [GP Executive Producer David] Horn.  The "back end" would be in DVD sales, on-demand sales, or the rights to resell the program to different broadcast or streaming services, along with whatever added audience the broadcast brings to the show for future productions.

For decades, cast albums almost singlehandedly performed what would seem to be a similar function in terms of extending a show's audience, and therefore its potential life after closing on Broadway, while bringing in some residuals.  But in terms of video, the historical timing seems perfect, and SJS looks very shrewd indeed, to have chosen the "back end" even at the cost of forfeiting whatever upfront royalty he might otherwise have been paid for the video captures of these shows.  Broadcasting them from the mid-1980s to mid-90s, with occasional reruns for a decade thereafter followed by home video and eventually streaming,  brought them (and him) to the attention of, I would guess, a whole lot more people than would likely have seen a live performance or bought the cast albums on their own.  I suspect that his 21st-century renaissance — represented onstage almost entirely by revivals and concerts, a steady cascade of both for the past twenty years — and his modest but equally steady spread into popular culture (think South Park, Desperate Housewives, Glass Onion), not to mention his subsequent canonization, all owe quite a bit to those videos' having brought the full shows to audiences many of whom, if they'd heard of Sondheim at all, had previously been subsisting on cast albums — and Tony clips (impossibly meager crumbs in retrospect), viewed on the night and/or taped on VHS to be worn to shreds with repeated viewings.

Later came the internet, with its unique ability to forge all those far-flung fans into a community of sorts.  But I'd bet that more of us had more to talk about on, say, the Internet 1.0 version of Finishing The Chat, because of PBS and home video than would ever have been the case if those videos had never existed.  And then, of course, YouTube and social media came along and made video arguably essential to any sort of virality SJS could achieve, however limited or gradual.  While clips or full "slime tutorials" of the various revivals and innumerable regional and educational productions certainly played their part in keeping Sondhead culture current, those original captures (Sweeney, Sunday, Into The Woods and Passion: the pinnacle of his success with Prince, and the entirety of his work with Lapine) could probably lay as much claim as the cast albums to having anchored his reputation among those who never saw their respective productions onstage, and who might just as likely have been steered to buy their OCRs by having seeing the captures on TV (or DVD or YouTube) as vice versa.

Add the filmed concerts, beginning with Follies in 1985, and the revivals captured by Digital Theatre and Fathom/NT Live and all the rest, and you have a collection of theatre-on-video — circulating and recirculating for a decade now in the niche paradise of streaming-on-demand — that is completely unexampled among Broadway dramatists.  And all this is to say nothing of the the various movie-movie adaptations, the documentaries, or the now unmanageable sprawl of audio recordings encompassing not only cast albums (although those keep proliferating too, with each new revival spawning its own recording) but also innumerable cabaret vocalists and jazz instrumentalists and so forth.

Hindsight is 20/20, but one is tempted to surmise that the preservation and dissemination of these "great performances", on video especially, was as much an intentional cause as a well-deserved effect of their composer's late-career ascension, in which comparisons with Shakespeare have become not only unabashedly serious but routine, rapidly verging on cliché.

[scenicdesign71]

I just now found this Kickstarter appeal from 2022, when Manual Cinema was beginning work on their first self-produced short film Future Feeling:

And this trailer, released two months ago:

Still no release date more specific than "2024", but as of April 12 they were finishing up post-production and getting ready for festival submissions.

I think the trailer looks exciting!  Without a shadow-puppet or an overhead projector to be seen anywhere, it does indeed look like MC's most intricately detailed and sculptural work yet.  And while they have been honing their skills at marrying 2D and 3D for a while now,  the Kickstarter pitch doesn't sound like hot air to me: this really does look like a whole new level for them.  Sight unseen (for the time being), I won't be surprised if an Oscar nomination follows.