“I just saw the production; it premiered tonight after being postponed due to the recent hostilities in the county. My sister plays Sharpay Evans and it was thrilling to be able to watch it in the midst of such an ugly national crisis - very emotional.” That’s the comment that Milia Ayache, from Lebanon, left in answer to my entry about a “Multi-cultural High School Musical.”
Milia also directed me to the event profile on Facebook, which I have happily added to my profile (though I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, sorry). Theatre de Mazitou, the production house exclusively licensed by Disney to produce High School Musical in Lebanon, also talks more about their purpose in producing the musical. They held the objective “to reinforce and enhance novelty in Lebanon, shake up their talents and intellect and give them a chance to express themselves in their country. The lines of work we approach are utterly in respective of the growth of children’s intellect, internal and external development as well as their output.”
The troupe had to overcome a situation not commonly faced by theatrical groups - on May 8th, the country fell into “chaos” as a general strike was called - and by strike, we’re not talking about people holding placards and marching in a line. “You could hear gunfire crackling across Beirut all morning” reports Robert Fisk. In spite of this, they carried on with the premiere a week later, and I’m incredibly impressed and hope they have a fantastic run. Kudos to them for the bravery in the face of very difficult times, and holding to the theatrical tradition of “the show must go on.”
“If the same Lebanese theater group were to put on something by Sondheim, would it bother you less?” asks Milia. I understand the question - the idea that some plays are “classics” and that something of a higher perceived quality, it somehow stops being cultural assimilation and becomes common human experience.
I don’t know if my objection is so much to the author of the show or even the quality as much as the language. I believe that there are probably excellent Lebanese playwrights and stories that, if U.S. theatre goers were more open, would add to the cultural richness of Broadway (not to mention TV and movies). But international cinema remains the purview of upper-class liberal hippy types (yes, I’m generalizing and stereotyping here) and the international theatre scene remains the purview of the Ivory Tower of academia. I think, in the end, we all lose out in the one-way spread of cultures.
Correction: While having lunch with Douglas Rosenberg today, he corrected one fact that was not clear in my recent post about John Henry. While it is true that John Henry never actually served in Vietnam, he was in the army, and served honorably; the interesting thing is that the metaphor of the war and combat experiences became a metaphor for the struggles he endured as a gay man, as an artist, and as someone fighting AIDS. I apologize for the error.
Jealous of my Friends: A fellow blogger and online friend of mine, Viviane, is sitting as I write this at a performance of Passing Strange, the hot new musical on Broadway. I mentioned a while back that this looks to be the hot new show, and it’s getting hotter. Seven - count ‘em, seven - Tony nominations, including four for the shows auteur and autobiographical subject, Stew:
Best Musical
Best Actor: Stew
Score: Stew and Heidi Rodewald, and lyrics by Stew;
Book Musical: Stew
Orchestrations: Stew and Rodewald
Featured Actor and Actress: Daniel Breaker and de’Adre Aziza
I recommend that when the Tony’s happen you gather with friends in front of a big screen TV with a lot of rolled-up white socks. Whenever someone thanks God, or has a horrific dress, or seems insincere, or you just feel like it, hurl your socks at the screen, booing loudly.Trust me, it’s fun. Almost as much fun as watching the nominated musicals (damn you, Viviane!). I will console myself with some of the free music downloads that are available, but I’m sure you’ve already done that yourself, right? Or, like me, you’re counting the days until May 27th when the whole cast album becomes available on iTunes…
John Henry was a self-described “performing artist/educator” who realized he was dying of AIDS and decided to turn his preparation for death into a performance piece. With the collaborative help of Douglas Rosenberg and Ellen Bromberg, a dance/technology piece was born.
A large part of that piece dealt with John Henry’s experiences as a combat soldier in Vietnam. He integrated those experiences into the piece, combining video of combat footage with live onstage dancing. You can see several videos of the stage performance here; as the piece toured, however, the performance was required to change to accommodate John Henry’s declining health as AIDS took his body.
While they knew that the live performance piece would die along with John Henry, Rosenberg and Bromberg wanted his legacy to live on, and therefore began working on a documentary (also titled Singing Myself a Lullaby) that would talk about the creation of the stage piece and the issues as he prepared himself for death.
Here’s the kicker: after he died, in the process of doing research the documentarians discovered that John Henry had never actually served in Vietnam. All of his stories, his richly evocative dancing, the tremendous emotion he engendered in others as they heard his tale and watched the videos with the movement - all of it was a lie.
At the same time…there is something to be said about the fact taht when one touches that many people, when such a powerful work is created, it takes on its own kind of truth. And that ends up being the subject of the documentary, which has excerpts here and can be purchased here.
I’m more interested in the fact that John Henry found it necessary to take on the trappings of his generations’ biggest tragedy. He didn’t pretend to be a fireman or a doctor or a speedboat racer. No, he found something in the miasma of war that seemed necessary to him as he performed in the final days of his life. He’s not around to ask if he’d convinced himself of what happened. Isn’t it interesting, though, that out of all the common experiences that our culture shares, we keep coming back to war as the defining factor? Even me - I spent two years as a Marine, twenty as a father, ten as a dancer - yet when I talk about my life, it’s the Marine that people latch on, assuming that it changed me and formed me more than anything else.
And the thing is, I can’t really argue that. I didn’t even serve in combat, but every day I think about something I did in the Marines, and as recently as six years ago I was walking out of a grocery store as a colonel in uniform was walking in, and my hand was halfway up in salute before I caught myself. Perhaps because it’s such a movement-based discipline, it resonates with dancers, who also find things burned into their bodies as they perform.
Whatever the reason, while not the truth he was telling, John Henry’s story tells a deeper truth about us all, I believe.
In the tradition of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, the new David Mamet play, November, is set just a few days before a presidential election. While having the site be a pseudo-official campaign site, complete with “Vote Now!” buttons, it’s also very entertaining. You also don’t have to watch too much to be able to tell which particular president is the model for Nathan Lane’s role, but again, they do it in a lighthearted way.
I’m sure I won’t get to see it on Broadway, but I’m also sure it won’t be far from a movie, probably with the same cast.
I often talk about the way that dances evolve, the way that they influence each other. Last night, in fact, I watched an excellent performer named Arielle do a hip-hop/bellydance fusion piece (she was also a competitor in a local So You Think You Can Dance competition, featuring Hok, interview forthcoming). Some dances are meant to be joined, and complement each other well.
I’m not so sure that this new turn of Morris Dancing is a good thing, however. According to this article in the UK Independent, there is a movement to take the traditional white-hanky-waving bell-jangling wholesome Morris Dance and turn it into, as the reporter put it, “the devilish spawn of Hell’s Angels and medieval mummers.”
It’s an interesting article, and you can learn a lot about Morris Dancing - with the caveat that while a lot of people have opinions about it, nobody really knows what it’s about. The interesting thing is the new generation, coming in with skulls on their hats and purple lipstick and embracing heartily the sexual and pagan aspects of the dance. It will be interesting to see what the old guard pagans make of that.
I have close friends in Minnesota who are part of a Morris Dancing team, and they also embrace the sexual and pagan aspects - in fact, they have a longstanding arrangement as the official Morris Dancers for the Smitten Kitten, an feminist sex-positive store. As for the pagan, well, as Wil Stryk (and what an apt name for a guy who operates an accordion for people hitting sticks together) put it to me, “We don’t really believe that we have to dance on May Day in order for the sun to come up the next day.”
“It makes me grouchy to show up to “dance” after “dance” to find such a paucity of invention.” That’s the sentiment of Apollinaire Scherr in her recent column about several dances created about the Iraq war. She mentions
“Not About Iraq Dance” at Danspace
“zero degrees” at City Center
“Far…” by Rachid Ouramdane
And she discusses the “Inertia” movement, which is the tendency to show tension in a dance environment through the lack of movement (hence the initial quote). I would have to agree, there does seem to be a lack of originality in terms of works about the war, but I believe the reason has more to do with the freshness of it, and also the very fine line between protesting the war and still supporting the soldiers. It’s hard even in conversation to express clearly the idea of honoring a person’s commitment to follow orders and risk their life while at the same time deploring the situation that led to it. Personally, do I believe that the soldiers would fight for my freedom? Yes. Do I believe they’re doing it? No. And that opens up a can of worms in most mixed company that can really make things difficult.
That being said, there are some other works (and one entire genre) that deal with war that I think show some of the breadth possible when addressing this difficult subject no matter what the era. I’m going to address one every day for the next few days.
Peggy Choy is a dancer of Korean descent who produced a work called Comfort Women. I start here because this was a piece that I was a part of, one of the first professional dance engagements I’d ever been in. At first I was completely honored, as someone who had admired her dancing for years. Then, as the choreography came to light, I realized that she had asked me not for my dancing ability but because she knew that I was a former Marine.
This actually was a disadvantage, due to her preconceptions about the military mind. I was asked to show my “rage” and “callousness” through my motions, to use actual close-order drill moves with a rifle to show wanton disregard for human life. That was a problem, because the military mind is not an angry one, nor is it callous. In fact, the military mind places such a high value on human life that the members are willing to pay the ultimate price to protect it - their own lives. It was immensely uncomfortable to be put into a stereotype, and I think that’s something that most choreographers need to be careful of - rather than presuming to understand the soldier’s mind, seeking to understand all of the motivations might produce some more expressive movements than simply sitting in place, shaking with frustration and fear.
You really want to see a dance about the Iraq war, then take a look at this piece. Art created during war time. What it lacks in finesse it makes up for in the simple fact that in the midst of such a conflict, soldiers feel the need to express themselves in this way.
OK, relax. It’s a headline trick to catch your attention - there’s nothing actually wrong with the High School Musical craze.
Yes, that’s right, I said craze. While it may be considered this generation’s Grease, and while Zac Efron may be the new John Travolta, it’s kind of like the story about Katie Holmes on Broadway - at a certain point you just reach media saturation, and it seems that everything that can be written has been. Which is why I’ve not written much about the High School Musical, or the sequel.
However, something happened this morning as I was in the grocery store, getting some toiletries and some breakfasty stuff: I saw a tiny stand featuring the HSM logo. Selling nail polish. Several different sets, in fact, presumably based on the different cliques.
It set off a dissonance in me. I’m thinking of this as, well, a musical. I think of it on Broadway, and usually you don’t see Broadway shows lending their names to trinkets in the grocery stores. But Disney has changed the rules of the game, you see. I think the big breakthrough was The Lion King. If you were a kid, you could go for the stuffed Simba dolls and talk about how you’re gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware. But if you were an adult you could get the silkscreened handbag with the Julie Taymor designed Mufasa head, and think about the brilliance of Garth Fagan’s choreography or Lebo M’s collaboration with Hans Zimmer on the music. It reached across a spectrum, going from cartoon to the fine arts.
High School Musical hasn’t exactly hit the fine arts yet, but think on this:
In the U.S., the original album was quadruple-platinum, the top of 2006
It also broke top-100 records with 9 original songs simultaneously.
2006 also put it at #2 for the United World Charts and #1 in Mexico
The novelization was a NYT bestseller, selling 1.2 million copies
Disney has licensed the musical 2500 times
The musical has been performed over 10,000 times by amateur theatre groups.
It’s also been adapted to an ice skating version, which will tour over 100 cities internationally in its first year (see, that’s where the headline comes from. Catchy, no?)
And they’re not stopping. The license to High School Musical 2 will be available in October of 2008, and an estimated 2000 high schools are gearing up to produce it. Filming for “High School Musical 3- Senior Year” has begun under heavy security in Utah.
And here’s the thing: the perfusion of this musical through our culture is good. It’s a story of differing groups maintaining their identities and still getting along. Something the world needs right now. Maybe Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama should stage a show of it to patch up the party.
I guess the nail polish kits shouldn’t bother me. I just need to adjust to the new way of musicals, their own version of the “long tail.” But for someone who idolized the gypsy lifestyle, where the musicals stayed on the floorboards and maybe in a recording studio. No more. Now it’s in my google, in my grocery store, everywhere I turn.
After only one show, the Broadway show Glory Days has been cancelled. One show. Well, one show and very sad ticket sales. The fact is, it had 17 performances in preview with, including a run at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA which got good reviews.
It’s got to be heartbreaking for first-time authors and actors Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner, both in their early 20’s, to have come so close to their dream only to have it shut down. Of course, they’ve got lots of opportunities to continue their Broadway career - hell, Gabriel Byrne didn’t get his break until age 40 - but it’s still got to be depressing, even if there is some sort of Producers-like strategy going on with the money men.
It doesn’t exactly seem fair, though. I was reading about Los del Rio and the song “The Macarena.” While they were successful musicians, that was arguably their only hit. Yet because of it, in 2003 they made $250,000 in royalties - eight years after the song was first released. Basically, they’re set for life based on one song.
Developing a play is arguably much harder. And yet it’s unlikely that Glory Days will net the auteurs anything more, in spite of their good reviews in VA.
So…I salute them, at least for their efforts. And wish them luck next time.
OK, there’s a reason I do a performing arts blog and not a celebrity blog.
I read things like this. No, don’t click it, I’ll save you the trouble: it’s an article about how Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes went to a show on Broadway. Just like thousands, millions of other people.
But the fact that Katie went means that there is more substance to the substantiated rumor that she is in the running for a role in All My Sons. Which is fine, I love the idea, it’s a “straight play”, and it would definitely get her known as more than Cruise’s wife.
But they just went to a play, folks. That doesn’t mean that they’re more or less likely to be in one, any more than me going to see Iron Man means I’m secretly working on my magnum opus.
Well, I am, actually, but still.
I know I promised to cover this story as she heads towards Broadway, but…I just don’t know if I can take it.
In a recent web interview, Stephen Sondheim was asked which of his musicals he’d like to see next put on the silver screen. His response was almost comical in its helpless-before-the-wheels-of-success attitude: “ It’s not so much a question of which I would like to see, rather which I think would lend itself..There is a move afoot to do Follies movie with a well-known director and a well-known star, and I’m not going to tell you who they are.”
Well, fine, Mr. Sondheim, be that way. He did reveal that he thought that Company would be well suited to the silver screen, and my first reaction was to agree…until I thought about it some more. There were some people who were horrified at the casting of Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd because of what they saw as his lack of singing ability (I personally thought he did fine, but I’m not a purist). However, one of the things I like about Company is the jewelbox production - one stage, the performers playing the instruments, the stylized way the set becomes a party or a balcony or a bedroom just because the performers choose to see it that way.
If someone took Company and decided to shoot it in NYC, on location, with dance numbers in Central Park and such…I’d be appalled. Horrified. It’s not that kind of show - it needs to be character-driven. And I’m not sure that a movie-going audience will accept a character-driven story that doesn’t have obvious changes of scenery.
No, I want to see Into the Woods, dammit, and I want it with the kind of green-screen CG that made 300 and Sin City so much fun. More than that, though, I want to leave some of these musicals on the stage,and just let people like Baz Luhrman continue to develop the movie musical as just that: a movie musical, not an adaptation.
What’s your opinion? Any musicals you’d especially like to see on the screen? Or absolutely not?
Whether its the latest reality show or medical mystery, the newest book, the wildest music or your favorite TV show, we can entertain you. Follow the best the entertainment industry has to offer spoilers, recaps, star sightings and more.
I’m more interested in the fact that John Henry found it necessary to take on the trappings of his generations’ biggest tragedy. He didn’t pretend to be a fireman or a doctor or a speedboat racer. No, he found something in the miasma of war that seemed necessary to him as he performed in the final days of his life. He’s not around to ask if he’d convinced himself of what happened. Isn’t it interesting, though, that out of all the common experiences that our culture shares, we keep coming back to war as the defining factor? Even me - I spent two years as a Marine, twenty as a father, ten as a dancer - yet when I talk about my life, it’s the Marine that people latch on, assuming that it changed me and formed me more than anything else.
Recent Comments