The Playgoer: Weekend Reading

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Saturday, July 02, 2011

Weekend Reading

To get you through the fireworks and barbeque...

-How do you build a traveling Elizabethan playhouse in the Park Avenue Armory? Take a sneak peak at the RSC's summer home in NYC.

-Two more detailed post-mortems of "Spidey 1.0." Very thorough.

-Speaking of troubled Broadway musicals, check out the story behind the 1946 flop Sweet Bye and Bye by no less a pedigree than Vernon Duke, Ogden Nash, S.J. Perelman and...Al Hirschfeld! (It didn't even make it to Broadway but has now been recorded.) Features probably greatest one sentence plot description ever: "The story, a farce, is set in 2076 and tells of a nebbish who, as the result of a time capsule from the 1939 World's Fair, inherits a candy cartel."

-And, finally, Tim Robbins goes to jail.  No, don't get too excited--he directs California inmates in Tartuffe! At least he did until the budget cuts eviscerated arts in the prisons. Still, the power of commedia, eh?

5 comments:

RLewis said...

Wow, the RSC took a beautiful space and turned it into just another theater. For this city, it's kinda like bringing coals to New Castle. What an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Anonymous said...

RLewis: I have been scathing in my criticisms of the RSC's new theatre in Stratford (and, incidentally, received a very considerate, if unconvincing, reply from Michael Boyd). I mention that to contextualize my comment to you. You don't really expect the RSC to restage all those productions to create Armory-specific versions, do you? They're not Punchdrunk. Even if you weren't intending them to go that far, the edifice they're bringing is hardly "just another theater". (It's Newcastle, btw.)

RLewis said...

Ya don't have to be Punchdrunk to be creative, and there's already been a show in that space where the audience seating moved during the performance, so I'm sure that greater ideas could have been concieved. Although I'd prefer something more simply artistic, after 46 shipping containers, I can't see drawing the line at re-blocking.

Anonymous said...

@RLewis: You clearly have no clue of the intention and scale of this operation.

Playgoer said...

Ok, enough, take it outside guys...