Fun theatrical reading

Bobo browses sites, gets behind, fails to post ...

In an effort to spread the word about recent articles of note, here goes:

In The Guardian, John Caird's 10 tips for directors:
Unfortunately ends with a plug for his book, but — despite a couple of the commenters — some reasonable advice for those who want to break into or improve their stage directing. Note how obvious (and yet frequently ignored) Nos. 1 and 2 are.
Bobo's often reminded — in casual conversation, in looking around at shows — at how seldom local actors and directors attend one another's shows. (Probably I'm missing something. But if I'm not ...)
What are the chief reasons that you, Local Theater Person, don't get out to shows more often? a) money, b) time, c) unconvinced of quality, d) not that passionate about theater, would rather play with my cat, e) too baked to care.

In The London Times, Sir Peter Hall and Sir Alan Ayckbourn reminisce about theatrical good times — worth reading if for nothing other than Hall's reverse-psychology approach to giving notes at rehearsal.

Also in The Guardian, a piece about Juliet and Her Romeo — an adaptation for geezers, as it were, in which Sian Phillips (I, Claudius) and Michael Byrne (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) play the lovers in old age: Juliet's in a nursing home, and her daughter decides to marry her off to wealthy man — that is, until fellow nursing-home occupant Romeo catches sight of Juliet's lustrous gray hair and distinguished wrinkles.

The best profile of Sam Shepard I've ever read, by Carole Cadwalladr in (again) The Guardian: Shepard on feeling like a misfit, on the effects of his fame on his children, on doodling in his notebooks because that other Sam (Beckett) did.


But most important of all:  Theresa Rebeck's speech on sexist discrimination against women in the theater.
In this area, we are fortunate to have Yvonne A.K. Johnson running the region's oldest — and, currently, most stable and successful — theater, and to have Sandy Hosking writing as co-Resident Playwright, also at the Civic (and directing, too!). Rebeck cites the abysmally low numbers of female playwrights and directors in the business. And yet women are earning most of America's academic degrees, now at all levels — and they buy most of the theater tickets.

The link to the misogynistic review (from Oct. 2000) that she refers to is here.

(For now, Bobo is following a strategy of posting theater-community-only-oriented material here on this blog while posting theater-related-but-more-general-interest stuff both here and at Inlander.com. For the 13 of you who are listening: Is that a good procedure? ]

[ photo: Theresa Rebeck, from theinsider.com ]

Judy, Judy, Judy -- and good books on theater

Ben Brantley was asked in December to list his favorite books on the theater and came up with four:

Moss Hart, Act One

Peter Hall's Diaries (gossip from the NT in the '70s)

Kenneth Tynan, Curtains

and

Wiliam Goldman's The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, in which he analyzes under thematic headings just about every show of the 1967-68 Broadway season.

Bobo can hear you going, "Ho-hum. Forty years ago. Ancient history." But Goldman (who wrote the script for a couple of Paul Newman movies you may have heard of (Harper and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) is a very intelligent and engaging writer.

Imagine Bobo's joy, then, on traipsing down into the basement of 2nd Look Books a few weekends back and scoring a copy of The Season for just $8. (Act One he's read; he's going after the other two, though Brantley advises that Curtains is rare enough that you're really only likely to find it online.)

Right off the bat, Goldman plunges into the adulation, the hysteria, that Judy Garland's cabaret show generated among crowds that season. She can't hit all her notes; she disappoints the Judy fanatics by singing some less familiar or even new songs. But then, magic happens. A snip:

"... pretty soon it's 'The Trolley Song,' and at the very end of it there are the words 'with his hand holding mine,' and 'mine' is a tough note, high and climactic. As she gets to it, she spreads her feet just a little wider, and suddenly she's eating the mike -- it's down her throat, jammed -- and from somewhere she found it, because at precisely 10:30, on the word 'mine,' she hit the high note with all she had and on-the-button perfect, and you could actually hear them gasp because she did it, she got a note right, a hard note yet, and she got it. It wasn't just that she was on pitch -- she's almost always on pitch, or at least you know she knows where the pitch is if she's off it -- it was pitch plus volume plus timbre plus whatever else it is that distinguishes once voice from another, and this was Garland's voice, the old Garland's voice, back again, just like in the movies, and even though it was only for one note it was enough to tear the place apart."

That's great reporting and writing, folks. And Bobo's only five chapters in, but the book's timeless and full of insights about what theater is and could be.

Bobo, in his vast ignorance, has just learned that Goldman also wrote the following screenplays: The Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride, Misery and Chaplin. He's 77 now, and it's sad to think (given the happy family portrait of Goldman and wife and two small daughters on the jacket of my '69 hardback) that he divorced his wife back in 1991.

Moss Hart, who had already written You Can't Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, also wrote the 1954 script for the remake of A Star Is Born -- which of course starred Liza Minellli's mother -- and then Act One in 1959.

And this June 22 will be the 40th anniversary of Judy Garland's death.