Apparently The Actors Fund also have a 'shoe allowance' for those whose taps are reprehensible. Who knew! Not sure if that extends to 'cats in tights'. Or indeed 'alien' Hamlets. Guess they can't make the 'I want song' happen though….One of Andrew and Kitty’s ‘non-hits’
çhat plus Change...
"listen to your inner cat Alec Bucolski", spake the great 'Meow'.
If Cole Porter were on social media today would he too be censored?
Borat, however, is a man with no boundaries. Longing for him to sing, "MA AA cat should be famous, of course neUUUtered for Amerika!”
Kitty is a big fan of Stars in the House (and the reason for their existence being donations to The Actors Fund), though she was a bit 'miffed' when Seth spake recently rather vehemently that they didn't help "TV celebrities or movie stars". D'accors…mais, just to walk-on to a Broadway stage costs the producers a minimum of $100k p/a/. Let alone the Bette Midlers of this world. Or rather Midler:) You know, one Brit 'movie star' did the lead in a blockbuster Bruckheimer movie a while back and all she got was something like $35k buy out. All things being equal which indeed they are not and never will be…guess the pr flights and hotels were nice.
Kitty was paid in 'Whiskers' for some of her early work. Now I know where you got that idea Amy Palladino:) The least you could have done was...
So I guess: no new Louboutins for anyone;! There's a Floyd Collins Cast Reunion coming up (Adam Guettel music/lyrics of The Light in the Piazza Broadway fame). Who knew!
Maybe Stars in the House is somewhat relentlessly cheerful, but Broadway has a bad rep/rap (Danish joke;) in the 'Leonard Cohen ' category. I mean even Oklahoma! wasn't ever a laugh a minute. Fun Home, Jagged Little Pill, Avenue Q, Dear Evan Hansen, Ragtime, Next to Normal. West Side Story. Cabaret. Chicago-hello! Les Mis, Miss Saigon. Falsettos trilogy, You Got to Die Some Time. In fact most of Broadway has been a G'damn tragedy like most of opera! I mean, Betty Buckley in one performance ascending to the ‘kitty’ Heaviside Layer with bits of splintering wood showering down because a stagehand hadn't opened the ceiling trapdoor. Well, there are celebs coming up in a Frozen movie re-union. And, thankfully all ends well. Even in Frozen 10. But you gotta earn the ending!
Ooops, another rat just fell under a train,
Another rat just fell under a train,
Another rat just fell under a traaaaaaaiiiin!
The Bridges of Madison County will reunite for a two-hour live panel event on Monday, March 15, at 8pm ET. All donations and proceeds from the event will benefit the Actors Fund. Streams on Facebook and YouTube. The original cast and creative team of Sondheim’s Assassins to mark the show's 30th anniversary, with a free event taking place on March 8 at 7pm ET
[p.s.] And one has to ask oneself about Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Why was this downbeat musical such an enormous success (all things relative)? It's why the film Joker earned such a high gross world wide. It's not that humans are 'ghouls' (though some clearly are). Or love 'blood' which…It's that people want some moments of truth in their otherwise 'lied to' existence. Why theater ever began in the first place. Why theater was compulsory in ancient Greece. Why did The Bridges of Madison County work as a movie, a book, but fail as a musical (I never got to see it, though it won Tony Awards ? Not that Jason Robert Brown wasn't Stephen Sondheim, although I'm sure he'd readily admit that he isn't and wasn't:) Why did Carrie fail as a musical. Or did it?! The producers closed the show just as it was getting some interest.
Of course, the musical Hamilton wasn't exactly a truth. But it was more true of a show than most folks had even seen before.
The moral of all this is: if you don't exit that theater your head shedding tears of humanity. Then something is clearly not good. And something should indeed be wonderful.
{found print with broken glass. Found trumpet.} Assemblage. Website screengrab.
© Andrew Lucre
Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla (Born: March 11, 1921, Mar del Plata, Argentina)
Oh Kit, wish you could see this Wien Traviata (March 7, 2021-brava Wiener Staatsoper for keeping the faith with no live audience)! You'd totally get it. Australian stage director Simon Stone really gets it too. It's like only his fourth opera after loads of innovative stage work. And it's the role debut for the South-African soprano Pretty Yende. And Violetta is a fashionista, social media queen, IG posts streaming across the stage. (Set by Bob Cousins, video design by Zakk Hein all originated Opera de Paris Sept 2019) Wow is Yende sexy and beautiful! Even in no-midriff tracksuit! (Are we even allowed to say that anymore unless it makes loads of money for everyone!?)
Such a sad, beautiful, ever relevant production. There was social media in Paris way back when. Twas' called gossip. Quelle chat change….There was never a guarantee that love would have saved Violetta. But often that is one's only hope. Many forsaking that, surely is the world's greatest sadness. (re streamed Saturday March 20, 1pm ET for 24h)
What La Traviata raises is the question: what is the difference between love and devotion? Is there one? In the musical Grease there's a song Hopelessly devoted to you. But if it is indeed devotion how could that be hopeless? Has this question become ever present under Covid? I am totally useless, though, as a 'human population sample'( I'd be jettisoned by an alien probe:) Can one's devotion ever be separated from one's love? Yes. Can one be devoted to more than one? Yes. Be in love with more than one? No. Be devoted to one and in love with another. Yes. Love is akin to time travel: matter cannot occupy the same space. Nor can love. There is only one space. Therein lies much of human sadness and almost all of the world's greatest works of music, art, literature. French philosopher Simone Weil 'nailed' it in Gravity and Grace. Everything else-love, devotion, all the material world, perhaps all the philosophical world-is subject to gravity. Grace is something you just can't enter into no matter how much devotion, love, anything else you profess. One needs be weightless of mind, body, soul.
Strange to say, but a film like Disney's Enchanted bizarrely gets somewhat close. Love and devotion come very near in their orbits, because the seam between the fairy tale and the reality ought to be seamless. Is that why the musical Wicked became such a success more than the critics wished?
Hmmmm...
March 14, 2021: If Elton the Walrus wants to film his scenes in Ireland that's fine by me. Whats your availability like Saoirse?;)
Should really end this post here.
….but was listening to Opera America's hosted Zoom Behind the Table: Demystifying the Opera Audition and where it's now at. Everyone interested in opera needs to see this. What's heartening is that maybe processes will change, broaden and allow video auditions in the future. Save impoverished artists the plane fare. I'm not at all agin those changes. It's a bit like seeing a film on a multiplex-screen, let lone a private viewing screen and then your 50-inch home cinema. If you know your stuff, then really: experts can tell from a video/audio recording. Just as I can tell a shit movie on a laptop from a private multiplex and catering! Experience counts for a lot. The bottom line for all of this and everyone (and I've watched in person loads of masterclasses): be yourself. There will be dozens if not thousands more lapping at your heels. Maybe a whole lot 'better'. But if you can sit comfortably with your instrument and play nothing but silence. Presence. A future. Then you have my interest. You know what I mean…
No-one can teach you how to play like Richter or Horowitz. The expertise and genius of Barenboim at the piano is so often forgotten because he constantly moved on. Re-invented. Moreover, searched for meaning in this crazy world (watch his Beethoven sonata masterclasses from Chicago and tell me they aren't revelatory!) Tell me that HE is not still relevant as an artist!
When you're 20 now you think you know everything. Well you know more than I did at your age. And yet. At 18 I was watching Fassbinder, Wertmuller, Kurosawa, Kirk Douglas, Sidney Lumet, Albert Finney…! Does anyone 18 still deserve wear an arthouse film hat? I'll drink to that!
Times have changed. Even more so now. But in a sense they are always the same. Folk didn't gravitate to choreographer Bob Fosse 'cause they were influenced. Because he was breeding something NEW. EXCITING. CHALLENGING. Sure, mediocrity sold then as now as will ever. And many folk will profit from it. But what profits a man….
If you have a voice. Believe in the voice. You will find a way to make it heard. Lucky if you are thrust onto that world stage. Maybe even luckier, if you've allowed your own way.
Sing! All those birds in the Spring dawn chorus. Why do I hear you, and you, and you?
Happy Birthday Liza Minnelli. Ahh. you're still such a 'babe'! What are we talkin' about!!!!!
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Many will be relieved that Maestro James Levine has passed away. Squaring the circle of his genius and power as a conductor with the dark side of his sexual behavior isn't easy. Of course impossible. Tragic that someone so passionate, so loving, so diligent of music could not harbor those very qualities in his personal life. For those who were Levine's accusers it must be heart-wrenching to experience the beauty and rapture of his 25th Anniversary Metropolitan Opera Gala in 1996. His stupendous ability to breathe love to his singers and musicians but alas not himself. At least we are left with the music and for some those rare moments of enlightenment in one’s career.
Some reflections of Maestro Levine's life, HERE, HERE and HERE.
[addition March 20: Very brave, unflattering piece on Levine from Kenneth Woods. The Tower Records Mahler story is OMG you just can't make that up! Maestro Levine was never in my Top 10 list of conductors. Even 20. And certainly no Bernstein. But his collaboration with singers, what you actually hear, and what they have praised is in no doubt. And I would always, with anyone, err on the side of caution, though most certainly not silence, when it comes to rumors and gossip. Just watched the Minnesota's Opera's Doubt and was very impressed that it kept a piercing momentum throughout to the end without 'histrionics'. As a final note. My experience of most Americans, and that's mine perhaps not others, is that they are very quick to judge, if not also be jury with scant information. They fill the void with an answer where perhaps there isn't nor ever will be one.]
Not that Levine was anything like The Great Gatsby but the final line of that novel (Levine conducted the opera premiere at The Met) “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” forever haunts me. What was Levine searching for that he found in music but never could find in life? Artists as tortured souls is so often baloney. Yet also often true. It took me a very, very long time for me to realize that what I was seeking would never be found in the material world as much as the objects of artisans thrill and delight me. Any why, really, it's only in the last few years I've actually enjoyed singing and playing the piano rather than just making sounds. Struggling. That and writing seem to be the only things real to be in this troubled world. Yet one hears of doctors, nurses all manner of skilled folk whose existence on this planet is enriched by engaging with the very world others feel (often factually) has betrayed and abandoned them.
As Leonard Slatkin observed in the young Levine (1964), he just had this innate sense of sculpting a performer's musical interpretation without even a ripple in their water. Covid, I think, I would hope, has lead many to re-consider why they do what they do. And if indeed it needs be what they are doing. Always, I'm curious about detritus. Casually one day, I took home an almost blank notebook from a skip. In amongst the 90% of blank pages was a mere draft paragraph. A father had begun writing a letter to his son (presumably now an adult). He asked forgiveness for not being a better father. Of how he tried. I guess it was never sent. At least words started to flow.
