Mrs. Harris in Paris: why not the cat!
Drat! The Cat! How times have changed. The Anderson Tapes how times never ever…
Barbra Streisand returns to her Broadway dressing room
Missed this year's revival of The Goodbye Girl with Sierra. Such an uplifting, poignant ever relevant movie that received very mixed reviews. Reunion of the film’s cast.
Bernadette Peters and Martin Short on Broadway back in 1993. Casting!
Goodness knows we all "need a little Christmas right this very minute".
Ain’t No Mo sounded fun, ballsy and relevant. Hard to have the courage and take risks on Broadway. Really: what is the point of it all if you don’t!
Kimberly Akimbo thinking outside the box
And two of theater history’s most moving endings: one uplifting “Run boy, run!” (Camelot) the other gut-wrenching (Death of a Salesman) "He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person...We buried him today and nobody came. Nobody at all. I don't understand. He knew all those people, and none of them came."
Your primer-video for The Tony Awards on Sunday night.
Wondered whether to say anything about the Tribeca Film Fest kicking off tonight (June 7). Thank you for those few years of accreditation. Learnt a lot. Perhaps not quite the result you were hoping for, though. Over 100 new features, has Tribeca got just too big, lost its focus in earnestly helping new talent? Inevitably sponsorship everywhere. A mixed blessing? Cannes is manageable. You go a bit loopy but that’s just how you were before:) Filmmakers, critics. Thesps.
Wish Tribeca would/could slim it all down. In championing equality maybe you lose along the way the quieter ones. Those not banging their cinematic ‘tin drum’ so loudly. Simply scraping their triangle.
Mentioned this film before but Certain People never gained a US release. One of those quietly disturbing films that no-one knows quite how to pitch. It’s a bit French but not. A bit Whit Stillman but not. A bit a lot of things but not.
What it was was a plangent voice in a wilderness garnering little empathy from the rolling stone that at least gathered some moss. ‘I didn’t ask to be this person, and God knows I’ve tried so hard to help everyone. What am I?!!!!’
That is the film you never want lost in a film festival.
[After much debate (operatically sung of course due to the Writers Strike) ANDREW and KITTY have placed their Op.1 Tony Awards Opera Improv in the bottom drawer for now. KITTY felt it wasn't quite up to the high standards she has set for herself in the past. Can we expect a Wigmore Hall date for KITTY’s lieder recital? ]
But if you can’t be silly in your bedroom, where…? some may say, what happens in the chambre should…be continued next week…!
You never know when a large Parisian branch may hit you over the head like Horváth. Blown somehow across the Atlantic to North America. And you thought…!
Keep singing along ‘Isabelles’ Huppert, Rossellini, Leonard:)
Everyone told me my dreams were lies because I said out loud the things I should have kept secret. But all I wanted was to make it true: to wish, and to wish and to wish and to make it true.- Angel Deverall [Angel, François Ozon)
Anthropologist Mary-Ann Ochota, her enthralling musical choices and life. [expires Tuesday outside the U.K.]
The Tony Awards Live!
Ariana DeBose, one 'badass' kitten!
Brandon Uranowitz (Leopoldstadt) "An authentic life is a limitless life."
Michael Arden (Parade) must have spaked 'summat' interesting to get bleeped!
Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/ Underdog) "Theater is the great cure."
Brava, Sean Hayes (Good Night, Oscar), such an incredible story. Even more relevant in today’s world?!
Is it just me or was there a quietly seething passion at this year’s Tony Awards? Not that everyone wasn’t overtly excited. Just, there seemed to be an invisible torch passing on from history: Tom Stoppard, John Kander, Joel Grey, Jerry Mitchell, Susan Stroman. Suzan Lori-Parks around for as long as I remember. Well, we’re not 94 yet:) And the plays and musicals you did see and thought: why again? Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen. Am I romanticizing? There’s still a ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ crowd yet every one of them is different. And there are new audiences out there ready to be curious. Ready to buy tickets for something that isn’t a singing cereal box.
With Broadway production costs ever spiraling, importing tried and tested shows for the U.K. have proved a future. (Des McAnuff proved regional American houses like La Jolla could be a future. Atlantic Theater Company.) Applause for Brit producer Sonia Friedman. Jodie Comer (Prima Facie) could have rested on her laurels simply waiting for a lucrative movie. She chose instead, adventure. How good does it get nominated alongside Jessica Chastain.
Ashamed to say, didn’t know about the theater adaption of Life of Pi. Following in the footsteps of innovative Brit theater, Complicité, Cheek by Jowl, Emma Rice Kneehigh, Mark Rylance's Phoebus Cart. Pi looks like an inimitable evening in the theater. British creatives Tim Hatley and Andrzej Goulding, Tim Lutkin and Carolyn Downing picked up Tony production awards.
Don’t disagree with a word of Andrew Lloyd Webber. A little ashamed he was my ‘guilty pleasure’ in my formative years when extolling the experimental. No-one ever should feel guilty of music that moves them. Somewhat saddened that the great classical composer Louis Andriessen accused Mr.Lloyd Webber of plagiarism and not having an original musical thought. Louis wrote me such a lovely reply after meeting him at the Royal College of Music, offering my relative meagre talents.
Speaking of sadness. A house manager told a story on Stars in the House of [a 30something from the mid-West?] all dressed in pink and frills so so excited to see a Broadway show. It was La Cage aux Folles or similar ilk and she complained in tears to this house manager at interval that she never thought the show would be, well you know with ‘those people’. Hearing this tale, tears welled, not for the obvious; for her utter disappointment of this so special experience for her. Is the broader picture changing in America? Can ignorance ever be bliss? The definition of bitter bitter sweet Sarah Silverman?
This guy lived a life and I never knew any of this. …He never caught a break. He never got ahead. How fucked up is that? [Susie Myerson from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel channeling Arthur Miller]
Why Bridges Collapse would be viewing for those curious about the Titan sub disaster. Sure, crooks galore in the world who’d sell rotted wood for your Grandma’s rocking chair! The Titan sub arguments of stifling innovation are indeed worth noting and discussing. Is it ever wise to place all your eggs in one basket? The single point of failure (SPOF) in engineering terms. Richard Branson comes to mind as someone who was always beset by nay-sayers for his brazen endeavors. His early days proved a steep learning curve after which he always made sure he had enough chickens in his coup to replenish those broken eggs. Branson listened. Never foolhardy. There is self belief and there is self-doubt, physicist Richard Feynman: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. Hello Elizabeth Holmes, who was no fool. Alas…
Once upon a time there was an old cat who loved climbing trees. One afternoon he awoke with a fright falling into a basket of eggs below as a young girl stopped to pick wildflowers. THE END.
We ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
