Greek archaeologists have unearthed

 ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek archaeologists have unearthed by chance a more than 2,500-year-old bronze bull idol at the archaeological site of Olympia, the culture ministry said on Friday.

An observant archaeologist came across the mini-statue during work at the site, one of the most celebrated sanctuaries in ancient Greece, the ministry said in a statement.

With one of its horns sticking out of the ground after heavy rainfall, the statuette was found intact, close to the temple of ancient Greek god Zeus at Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games.

It was transferred to a laboratory for conservation.

Archaeologists believe that it was part of thousands of gifts offered to Zeus in the 1,050-700 B.C. period. Bulls and horses played an important role in the lives of ancient Greeks and so were frequently dedicated to the gods.

Eric Dolphy

Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, Salle Wagram

 

Salle Wagram

 

Harriet Frank Jr. with husband and writing partner Irving Ravetch on the set of Hud (1962).

 Ravetch worked mostly on Westerns such as Vengeance Valley (1951). With Frank, he approached producer Jerry Wald and proposed they adapt the William Faulkner novel The Hamlet (1940) for the screen.

The result was The Long, Hot Summer (1958), which primarily was an original story with one of Faulkner's characters at its center. When Wald greenlighted the film and asked Ravetch to choose a director, he suggested Martin Ritt, whom he knew from the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio in New York City.

 The Long, Hot Summer proved to be the first of eight projects – including The Sound and the Fury (1959), Hud (1963), Norma Rae (1979), Murphy's Romance (1985), and Stanley & Iris (1990) – written by Ravetch and Frank and directed by Ritt. Additional screenwriting credits include Home from the Hill (1960), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (also 1960), The Reivers (1969), The Cowboys (1972), and The Spikes Gang (1974).

Ravetch and Frank were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Hud. He was a recipient of the Bronze Wrangler for The Cowboys, the Screen Laurel Award, and additional Oscar, WGA, and Golden Globe nominations.

Ravetch died from pneumonia on September 19, 2010.

Frank and Ravetch collaborated on two films released in 1960, Home from the Hill, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, an adaptation of a Tony award-winning play.

Frank and Ravetch reunited with Martin Ritt to write the screenplay for Hud (1963), adapted from the novel Horseman, Pass By (1961) by Larry McMurtry. The film received positive reviews by the critics, with the couple sharing a New York Film Critics Circle Award for "Best Screenplay" and a Writers Guild of America Award (WGA Award) for Best Written American Drama. They were nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

 

Frank worked alongside her husband and Ritt on Hombre (1967), a Revisionist Western based on the novel of the same name.

The next year, Frank and Ravetch wrote the screenplay for House of Cards (1968, released in the U.S. the following year and directed by John Guillermin. For House of Cards, Frank was credited, together with her husband, under the pen name of James P. Bonner. Frank and Ravetch returned to the works of William Faulkner, writing the screenplay for a film adaptation of his last novel The Reivers (1969).

Frank and Ravetch wrote the screenplay for The Cowboys (1972), based on the novel of the same name, and The Carey Treatment (also 1972), based on the novel A Case of Need by Michael Crichton.

For the latter, the couple were credited under James P. Bonner, the last time they adopted the pen name. The couple reunited with Martin Ritt to write the screenplay for Conrack (1974), based on the autobiographical book The Water Is Wide, with Frank also working as producer. The film was commercially and critically well-received, winning a BAFTA award. The couple wrote for an adaptation of the novel The Bank Robber, released as The Spikes Gang (also 1974). Around this time, Frank also wrote the novels Single: a novel (1977), and Special Effects (1979).

Frank and Ravetch next project, Norma Rae (1979), was another collaboration with director Martin Ritt. The film tells the story of a factory worker from the Southern United States who becomes involved in labour union activities. Unusually, for the couple, the film was based on a true story, that of Crystal Lee Jordan. It was arguably their best received film, winning numerous awards, including two Academy Awards.

Another six years passed before the couple's next filmed screenplay, this time for the romantic comedy Murphy's Romance (1985), based on a novel by Max Schott. They worked again with director Martin Ritt, their seventh project together, and with Sally Field, who played the titular lead role in Norma Rae. Despite Murphy's Romance being well-received (it was nominated for two Academy Awards), it was five years before another Frank and Ravetch screenplay was shot; hired by Martin Ritt, the couple wrote the screenplay for Stanley & Iris (1990), loosely based on the novel Union Street by British writer Pat Barker.

Frank Jr. died at her home in Los Angeles on January 28, 2020 at age 96.

There's nothing like black and white film

A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940, reading a book titled “The History of London.”.

Edouard Boubat.

FDR in a rarely seen pose

Two women testing the temperature of Spadra Creek, Clarksville, 1953. Photographed by Yale Joel.

Untitled Daniel Teoli Jr.

Al my writer friends need to read this.......

 

It was one of those days.................

 

Seize the day

 

The first picture looks at you, the second one looks through you.” Soviet artist Eugen Stepanovich Kobytev before and after he went to war. These photographs were taken just 4 years apart

 

Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?

 

Was 1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?

 

By Ben Libman

“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.” So goes Virginia Woolf’s well-known complaint about “Ulysses,” scribbled into her diary before she had finished reading it. Her disparagement is catnip to those many critics who like to view “Mrs. Dalloway” — that other uber-famous, if more lapidary, modernist novel that spans the course of a single day — as Woolf’s rejoinder to Joyce. More than that, though, it tells us something important about our literary history. Nineteen twenty-two, the year of “Ulysses,” may well be ground zero for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is better captured by another year: 1925, that of “Mrs. Dalloway” and several other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as they emerge from under copyright.

If many an English-majored ear perks up at the sound of “1922,” it’s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” are taught everywhere and almost without exception as “signifying a definitive break in literary history,” to quote the critic Michael North from his book “Reading 1922.” Both the novel and the poem are notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one’s mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new.

Yet 1925 is arguably the more important date in modernism’s development, the year that it went mainstream, as embodied by four books whose influence continues to shape fiction today: Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection, “In Our Time,” John Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Compared with the masterpieces of 1922, these books — all slated for reissue in new editions this year — entered our culture in relatively unspectacular fashion. But it’s precisely their unassuming guise that allowed them, by osmosis rather than disruption, to diffuse their modernist conceits throughout the literary field, ensuring their widespread adoption.

In her 1919 essay, “Modern Fiction,” Woolf rebukes the popular novels of her time: “Is life like this? … Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. … Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

It’s commonplace to call Woolf an impressionist in this peculiar sense, and yet it nails her novelistic craft. She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in “Mrs. Dalloway” and later, in a more extreme sense, in “The Waves” (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo. As the critic J. Hillis Miller once put it, the reader most often finds that she is “plunged within an individual mind which is being understood from inside by an ubiquitous, all-knowing mind.”

 

This is evident to us not from the novel’s immortal opening line — “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” — but from the one immediately following, which serves as a kind of mirror to the first, tipping us off that we must reread it as something other than objective assertion: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” Suddenly, with the lightly colloquial “cut out for her,” we are in the mind not of an omniscient narrator but of a character — Clarissa Dalloway, as the succeeding lines make clear. The reader ceases to think that she is being told what Mrs. Dalloway said about getting the flowers, and begins to think instead that Mrs. Dalloway is just remarking on that fact, as if to herself. And that changes everything.

This narrative technique, known as free-indirect speech, was part of Woolf’s quiet revolution. Though she did not invent it — arguably Austen, Flaubert and Edith Wharton got there first — Woolf perfected this mode, coloring it with the anxiety of modern subjectivity. Open any novel of the past 50 years, and you will find the narrator reporting thoughts that, for reasons of diction and tense, can only be those of a character. With varying degrees of indebtedness, each of these is an heir to Woolf and her narrators, who enter the world of their fictions as Clarissa Dalloway enters the world of her relations, “being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.” That a narrator need not fiddle with chess pieces from on high but might linger like a cloud among foggy minds is a feature of modernism that has, as it were, contaminated literature ever since.

Opposed to the singularity of a work like “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land,” we have in “Mrs. Dalloway” the innovation of an enduring, deep structure — something like geometric perspective in painting, that contributes to the development of technique, rather than driving it up a dead end. So it is with “In Our Time,” “Manhattan Transfer” and “The Great Gatsby.” With “Big Two-Hearted River,” the last story in Hemingway’s collection, writers on either side of the Atlantic learned about the power of economy in writing. As if by revelation, it became clear that the solution to the problem of representing a collective trauma like World War I was not blabbering effusion, but its opposite.

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Hemingway told The Paris Review in 1958. The “iceberg” technique became the calling card not only of postwar American writers like Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy, but also of the influential cadre of French existentialist novelists, including Céline, Malraux, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Most important, though, Hemingway became an exemplary stylist for the M.F.A. programs that sprang up across America after the war, and through which many of our canonized poets and novelists have since passed. As the scholar Mark McGurl puts it in his book “The Program Era,” “It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Hemingway on postwar writers, and … too easy to forget that the medium of his influence has been the school.”

The legacy of John Dos Passos is less distinct, though no less potent. You do not hear his name much now, but in his day Dos Passos was among the most celebrated novelists writing in English. To Sartre, he was “the greatest writer of our time”; there was none other “in which the art is greater or better hidden.” Perhaps this is because novels like “Manhattan Transfer” were among the first to try to recreate the seamless artifice that cinema appeared to lend to its fictions. Dos Passos’ novel takes as its protagonist not a character but New York City itself, and makes liberal use of literary jump-cuts and montage against a backdrop of action-filled narration that moves at a relentless clip. His is a multimedia literature, a modernist twist on the flabby forms of social realism that stitches a collage of press-clippings, newsreels and radio announcers’ voices into the narrative fabric.

With Fitzgerald, by contrast, we have the inverted alternative to Dos Passos’ realist modernism. In “The Great Gatsby” Fitzgerald — just as Eliot would do in fits and starts throughout his career — seeks the preservation of Symbolism in modern American literature. That a writer could opt not to deploy a literalist account of the consequences of American greed but instead vie to refine a handful of supercharged moments of signification, which might bloom as an epiphany in the reader’s imagination, was this novel’s reverberating testament. Gatsby is but a symbol of himself, a dream that outstrips the reality to which it refers. Until he is not. And the lasting gift of the novel — which has echoes in the late-modernist pastiches of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid conspiracies of signs and the biblical symbology of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” — is to demonstrate the difference between the magic when it is on and the magic when it is gone.

It is fitting that “The Great Gatsby” sold few copies when it first appeared. Like the other great works of 1925, it did not announce itself with the bombast of “Ulysses.” Yet, like those other works, it has quietly endured, living on like a mist in our literary unconscious, spawning and shaping successive generations of writers and readers.

Ben Libman is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University.

 

 

 

 

— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

 

The evening that I now speak of was in October. I and one porter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead station to ourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of an engine to glow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The hills beyond the Dorking Valley were of a blue so intense as to be nearly violet and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold. The glorious week-end of reading was before me. Turning to the bookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can still remember the voice of the porter calling out the village names, Saxon and sweet as a nut—‘Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train.’ That evening I began to read my new book.

The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladies both good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure me on without the perceptions of a change. It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense the new country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had already charmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother of my nurse. Here we’re old wives’ tales; there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me by proximity—something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on this side of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I could ever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. Now for the first time I felt that it was out of reach not because of something I could not do but because of something I could not stop doing. If I could only leave off, let go, unmake myself, it would be there. Meanwhile, in this new region all the confusions that had hitherto perplexed my search for Joy were disarmed. There was no temptation to confuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, or to suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dream that if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodos journeyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at the same time, never had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been less separable from the story itself. Where the gif and the idolon were most nearly one there was least danger of confusing them. Thus, when the great moments came I did not break away from the woods and cottages that I read of to seek some bodiless light shining beyond them, but gradually, with a swelling continuity (like the sun at mid-morning burning through a fog) I found the light shining on those woods and cottages, and then on my own past life, and on the quiet room where I sat and in my old teacher where he nodded above his little Tacitus. For I now perceived that while the air of the new region made all my erotic and magical perversions of Joy look like sordid trumpery, it had no such disenchanting power over the bread upon the table or the coals in the grate. That was the marvel. Up till now each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert—‘The first touch of the earth went night to kill.’ Even when real clouds or trees had been the material of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of another world; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. Unde hoc mihi? In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincible ignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, even without consent. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.

 

 

"When it comes to being gentle, start with yourself. Don’t get upset with your imperfections. Being disappointed by failure is understandable, but it shouldn’t turn into bitterness or spite directed at yourself."— St. Frances de Sales

 

Don’t fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

 

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

 

Greetings NYCPlaywrights

*** FREE THEATER ONLINE ***

The 24 Hour Plays - Viral Monologues

New monologues written, rehearsed and recorded in 24 hours by stars of stage and screen! Round 1 through 24 now available for viewing.

https://24hourplays.com/viral-monologues/#watch

*** PRIMARY STAGES ***

The Storytelling of Marginalized People & The Business of Theater Classes at Primary Stages ESPA! 

Learn the history of the art of marginalized populations to then push the boundaries of traditional theater and reimagine what the future can be in The Storytelling of Marginalized People Workshop with Chesney Snow (Boxman in In Transit on Broadway) or learn about theater as a business in order to produce your own work with John Gould Rubin (Director, Turn Me Loose Off-Broadway). Classes begin in March. 

Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available. 

http://primarystages.org/espa/writing.

*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

The 2021 Femme Fatale Festival will be virtual.

1. All playwrights must identify as female.

2. Script can be no longer than 60 minutes in total.

3. Script can have limited previous productions.

4. Submission limited to 1 play per playwright

***

Stonecoast Review accept Fictions, Pop Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Dramatic Works, Experimental, and Visual Art. We can’t wait to see your best pieces! Stonecoast Review offers feedback on 10% of declined submissions. Contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the issue in which their work appears.

***

The Center at West Park Residencies

In Fall 2021, six individual artists or companies will be offered residencies at CWP to produce and perform original works of theater, dance, music, and interdisciplinary performance as part of THE INTERRUPTION: A Curated Performance Series. Each Residency will culminate in a weekend of three ticketed public performances of an evening-length work at CWP. Fall 2021 Residencies are available between August 30 and December 19, 2021.

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***

*** SPRING AWAKENING ***

FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN: EINE KINDERTRAGÖDIE // Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy remained unperformed for 15 years following its 1891 publication. The play was banned due to its portrayal of controversial content (sex, masturbation, rape, abuse, abortion, homosexuality, suicide). Max Reinhardt directed the first production, which premiered at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on November 20th, 1906. Subsequent productions have encountered varying critical and popular reception. Certainly the most successful iteration of Spring Awakening to date is Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s musical adaptation.

More...

https://springdramaturgy.wordpress.com/wedekind-fruhlings-erwachen/

***

Frühlings Erwachen

Script in the original German

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45091/45091-h/45091-h.htm

Script in English translation

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35242/35242-h/35242-h.htm

A PROEM FOR PRUDES

That it is a fatal error to bring up children, either boys or girls, in ignorance of their sexual nature is the thesis of Frank Wedekind's drama “Frühlings Erwachen.” From its title one might suppose it a peaceful little idyl of the youth of the year. No idea a could be more mistaken. It is a tragedy of frightful import, and its action is concerned with the development of natural instincts in the adolescent of both sexes.

The playwright has attacked his theme with European frankness; but of plot, in the usual acceptance of the term, there is little. Instead of the coherent drama of conventional type, Wedekind has given us a series of loosely connected scenes illuminative of character—scenes which surely have profound significance for all occupied in the training of the young. He sets before us a group of school children, lads and lassies just past the age of puberty, and shows logically that death and degradation may be their lot as the outcome of parental reticence. They are not vicious children, but little ones such as we meet every day, imaginative beings living in a world of youthful ideals and speculating about the mysteries which surround them. Wendla, sent to her grave by the abortive administered with the connivance of her affectionate but mistaken mother, is a most lovable creature, while Melchior, the father of her unborn [Pg vi] child, is a high type of boy whose downfall is due to a philosophic temperament, which leads him to inquire into the nature of life and to impart his knowledge to others; a temperament which, under proper guidance, would make him a useful, intelligent man. It is Melchior's very excellence of character which proves his undoing. That he should be imprisoned as a moral degenerate only serves to illustrate the stupidity of his parents and teachers. As for the suicide of Moritz, the imaginative youth who kills himself because he has failed in his examinations, that is another crime for which the dramatist makes false educational methods responsible.

***

Emma Goldman - The Social Significance of the Modern Drama

Frank Wedekind is perhaps the most daring dramatic spirit in Germany. Coming to the fore much later than Sudermann and Hauptmann, he did not follow in their path, but set out in quest of new truths. More boldly than any other dramatist Frank Wedekind has laid bare the shams of morality in reference to sex, especially attacking the ignorance surrounding the sex life of the child and its resultant tragedies.

Wedekind became widely known through his great drama “The Awakening of Spring,” which he called a tragedy of childhood, dedicating the work to parents and teachers. Verily an appropriate dedication, because parents and teachers are, in relation to the child’s needs, the most ignorant and mentally indolent class. Needless to say, this element entirely failed to grasp the social significance of Wedekind’s work. On the contrary, they saw in it an invasion of their tradi. tional authority and an outrage on the sacred rights of parenthood.

The critics also could see naught in Wedekind, except a base, perverted, almost diabolic nature bereft of all finer feeling. But professional critics seldom see below the surface; else they would discover beneath the grin and satire of Frank Wedekind a sensitive soul, deeply stirred by the heart — rending tragedies about him. Stirred and grieved especially by the misery and torture of the child, — the helpless victim unable to explain the forces germinating in its nature, often crushed and destroyed by mock modesty, sham decencies, and the complacent morality that greet its blind gropings.

Never was a more powerful indictment hurled against society, which out of sheer hypocrisy and cowardice persists that boys and girls must grow up in ignorance of their sex functions, that they must be sacrificed on the altar of stupidity and convention which taboo the enlightenment of the child in questions of such elemental importance to health and well-being.

The most criminal phase of the indictment, however, is that it is generally the most promising children who are sacrificed to sex ignorance and to the total lack of appreciation on the part of teachers of the latent qualities and tendencies in the child: the one slaying the body and soul, the other paralyzing the function of the brain; and both conspiring to give to the world mental and physical mediocrities.

“The Awakening of Spring” is laid in three acts and fourteen scenes, consisting almost entirely of dialogues among the children. So close is Wedekind to the soul of the child that he succeeds in unveiling before our eyes, with a most gripping touch, its joys and sorrows, its hopes and despair, its struggles and tragedies.

More...

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-social-significance-of-the-modern-drama

***

Moritz Stiefel faces expulsion due to poor marks. When he is caught with an essay titled “Shame and Lust”, he is indeed kicked out – instead of classmate Melchior Gabor, who actually penned it. Gabor was drawing on his experiences with neighbourhood girl Wendla. Then Wendla turns up pregnant. Stiefel descends into despair ... Exploitation between Eros and Thanatos in this “sexual tragedy of youth” based on Frank Wedekind’s play. That piece provided inspiration for many films of the Weimar era that anticipated later teenage movies, including Geschminkte Jugend (Painted Youth, Carl Boese), Zwischen vierzehn und siebzehn (Between Fourteen and Seventeen, E. W. Emo) or Die Halbwüchsigen (The Adolescents, Edmund Heuberger, all 1929). Setting the film in the 1920s provided a chance to explore “modern” youth culture, complete with cigarettes, jazz music, the gramophone, and a goodly bit of alcohol. Richard Oswald, a master of films of manners and young sex beginning in the 1910s, fully explores the temptations of the youthful body, even early childhood flirtatiousness. At the same time, with his target audience in mind, the film laments the bigotry and double standards of the adult world.

More...

https://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2018/02_programm_2018/02_filmdatenblatt_2018_201801940.html#tab=filmStills

***

As the tragically misunderstood teens of “Spring Awakening” could tell you, sometimes parents just don’t get it.

“I remember being on the phone with my mom about five years ago,” singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik recalled recently, sitting between a pair of vintage rock organs in a makeshift music studio in Manhattan.

In 2003, Sheik was touring to support what would be his last major-label album, “Daylight,” and Mom had some unsolicited staging suggestions.

“She was like, ‘Duncan, I saw Madonna on the “Today” show this morning, and they showed footage from her concert. She’s got dancers and lights, it’s a whole experience -- I don’t understand, why don’t you have that?’ ”

Sheik patiently pointed out the exponential budgetary chasm between a brand-name pop extravaganza and a solo tour by an artist with a single major chart hit (1996’s “Barely Breathing”). But if he was looking to tout his own theatrical ambitions, he could have pointed to a project he had begun with playwright Steven Sater: a pop/rock musical based on Frank Wedekind’s oft-banned 1891 play “Spring Awakening.”

At the time, of course, Sheik, a theater newbie, didn’t foresee the Broadway phenom that would emerge in 2006 from this unlikely premise -- complete with lights and dancers, Ma -- let alone the eight Tony Awards, the long Broadway run, the nearly assured place in the musical theater canon. A sit-down production in London opens next January, and the show’s U.S. tour docks at the Ahmanson this week.

For his part, playwright and lyricist Sater vividly recalls another momentous phone conversation along the show’s bumpy road.

“I still remember, I was on the phone, walking down West 57th, and Duncan was saying that what he disliked in musical theater was when people talked, then started singing -- it seemed arbitrary,” said Sater recently from L.A., where he spends most of his time. “And I said that the songs in our show could function as interior monologues. That’s where this concept was born.”

More...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-oct-26-ca-sheik26-story.html

***

...in 1999, Sheik, a practicing Buddhist, met Steve Sater at a Buddhist organization in New York City. Sater asked Sheik if he would write a song for a play he has been writing; Sheik took the bait, and eventually found himself inundated with lyrics from his new writing partner. “Phantom Moon” turned out to be a full collaboration between the two Sheik composing and Sater providing lyrics.

During the process of creating “Phantom Moon,” Sater gave his partner a copy of “Spring Awakening,” a German play from the late 19th century whose content ” teenage sex, suicide, criticism of the church ” made it controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. This was not merely recommended reading; Sater floated the idea that he and Sheik put songs to the play and produce a musical theater piece. Sheik resisted ” after all, he wrote songs meant to be heard on CDs and radio and in concert, not in the theater. But when Sater proposed doing that their “Spring Awakening” didn’t need to alter the approach they were already taking, Sheik began thinking about theater in a different light.

More...

https://www.aspentimes.com/news/duncan-sheik-awakening-the-musical-theater-world/

***

In “Spring Awakening,” with a ravishing rock score by the playwright Steven Sater and the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, flesh makes only a single, charged appearance. And for all its frankness about the quest for carnal knowledge, it is blessedly free of the sniggering vulgarity that infects too many depictions of sexuality onstage and on screen.

But in exploring the tortured inner lives of a handful of adolescents in 19th-century Germany, this brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of 13, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. “Spring Awakening” makes sex strange again, no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age, in which celebrity sex videos are traded on the Internet like baseball cards.

Wait a minute. Nineteenth-century Germany? Was sex even invented back then? Officially no. When the Frank Wedekind play on which the musical is firmly based was self-published by the author in 1891, Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” was still almost a decade away, and the subject of adolescent sexuality was so controversial that it was 15 years before the play was produced, even in a heavily censored form.

The smartest decision made by the creators of this adaptation was to retain the original setting in provincial Germany, to resist a facile attempt at updating the material. It wouldn’t have worked. The painful public silence on the subject of sex that warps the characters’ minds and in some cases destroys their lives would make no sense in a contemporary context. But the yawning gap between the force of desire and the possibilities for its release is not exactly an antique phenomenon.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/theater/reviews/11spri.html

***

Spring Awakening 2007 Tony Awards Performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Bl9NIBvY8

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