NYCPlaywrights
Sat 5/29/2021 5:00 PM
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
June 1st-9th, 2021
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and New York Theatre Salon proudly present GLOBAL FORMS THEATER FESTIVAL, a free, multi-medium festival showcasing over 100 theater artists from 34 different countries! This week-long theatrical event celebrates and uplifts the work of international and immigrant theater artists living in the United States and abroad.
Check out the line-up and RSVP
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The PTC New Play Festival is seeking short plays from early career playwrights for our Fall Festival season. 5 plays will be chosen for back-to-back production in the PTC Lab, our resident blackbox theatre.
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The Mu Tang Clan: Asian American Playwrights Incubator Program invites new, emerging, and experienced Asian American playwrights to apply to the 14-session program (convening virtually) where 5 playwrights (in addition to Saymoukda) will be in a peer-to-peer learning model as they write, share, and discuss topics related to the field and the influences that impact their work.
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The Van Lier New Voices Fellowship supports playwrights of color age 30 and under, who demonstrate financial need. During a year-long residency, Fellows will work on multiple artistic projects through an individually-tailored program of Lark play development programs, and form relationships with other theater makers at various career stages from all parts of the world. The Fellowship includes a cash award of $35,000, plus access to a $5,000 Opportunity Fund and to a wide range of Lark resources, including artistic program participation, office and rehearsal space, and staff support.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** MUSICAL v OPERA ***
More than ever, composers are busily breaking down walls between stylistic categories. Opera in particular has been a poacher’s paradise. We have had folk opera, jazz opera and rock opera. Bono, who collaborated with the Edge on the music and lyrics of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” called the show “Pop-Art opera.” Whatever that means. But of all such efforts, mixing opera with the Broadway musical might seem by far the most natural combination.
Then why are so many efforts to crisscross that divide so bad? For one thing, composers from outside the field often have a distorted understanding of what opera actually is. They borrow the most superficially grand, inflated and melodramatic elements of the art form, whereas opera is actually a richly varied and often tautly narrative genre of musical drama.
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Operas and musicals are similar in that they are both performed as musical theatre, with a story, character distinctions and arias. They are both made up of several songs, or musical pieces, connected by lines of dialogue; this is usually spoken in a musical, whereas in an opera it is performed as a recitative in which the dialogue transpires in a melodic or musical pattern.
Operas also tend to be continuous singing, although some musicals are sung through (eg Les Misérables). These are often acknowledged for their opera-like qualities by being called "popular" or "rock" operas.
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Few operas have found successful reinvention in the form of musical theater in today’s age. In the nineteenth century, Gilbert and Sullivan contributed a good many operettas based on the works of their classical forefathers, but most other composers’ attempts at operetta spoofs of operas are hardly well-known enough to influence the modern-day repertoire. “Rent” and “Aida,” on the other hand, based on “La Bohème” and Verdi’s “Aida” respectively, have become staples in musical theater (and, in the case of “Rent,” a cult phenomenon). The same can be said of “Miss Saigon,” which is now enjoying its first, limited-run revival since the London premiere in 1989.
Allegedly, “Miss Saigon” was first inspired when composer Claude-Michel Schoenberg beheld an image of a Vietnamese mother sending her child off to America, where it was hoped he’d live a better life with his ex-GI father. Puccini, on the other hand, the original master of this age-old tale, was inspired by yet another iteration: a play he attended based on Pierre Loti’s novel “Madame Chrysanthème.” While both the opera and the musical portray the age-old tragedy of an Asian wife waiting three years for her husband to return home, the exposition of “Miss Saigon” fills in the missing years and moments in a way that tells us what might have happened – unlike “Madama Butterfly,” which focuses the passing of time on Cio-Cio San alone, left with nothing but the murmurings of her mind.
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“I love opera!” I am so frequently told. “I have seen The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables ten times each and have every record by Andrea Bocelli, Il Divo and the Three Tenors!” Sometimes I ask these enthusiasts if they have ever seen a performance in an opera house and the answer is almost always no. More often, I bite my tongue, wanting to tell them that they don’t know what they are missing but at the same time not wanting to hurt their feelings.
Lately, I have been thinking anew about how much opera and musical theater have in common and yet how their fundamental differences give each art form a specialness that stubbornly maintains the blurry line between them. I do not wish to imply that people cannot work successfully in both musical theater and opera. Consider just a short list of artists who have done so with great success: George and Ira Gershwin, Grace Moore, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein, Ezio Pinza, Audra McDonald, Patti Lupone, Frederica von Stade and Julie Taymor. What made these people successful, apart from talent, outstanding colleagues and good material, was the awareness of the aesthetic differences between the forms and the ability to make them real on the stage.
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Opera and Broadway musicals share one very important trait: the power of singing. And while Broadway often adapts operas to their own aesthetic, some opera houses have taken existing, ambitious musicals and presented them as written. Here are seven Broadway titles that have been showcased through a classical lens at opera houses and companies around the world.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The Stephen Sondheim tale of a murderous barber had its opera house debut in Houston before transferring to New York City Opera in 1984, while an English National Opera Production starring Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson ran at London Coliseum in 2014. (The two also headlined a New York Philharmonic production preserved by PBS' Live at Lincoln Center.) One of the most popular theatre-opera titles, Sweeney Todd has been produced everywhere from the the Finnish National Opera to the Western Australia Opera and Paris' Théâtre du Châtelet.
Candide
Meghan Picerno, Linda Lavin, and Jay Armstrong Johnson Sarah Shatz
The Leonard Bernstein piece has gone through a bit of a roller coaster when it comes to stage productions. A version featuring a book by Lillian Hellman and Hugh Wheeler opened on Broadway in 1956, though ultimately ran for just two months.
Wheeler later restructured the book, and in 1982 Harold Prince directed the first of many productions of Candide by New York City Opera. Most recently, it was performed in 2017 by NYCO at Jazz at Lincoln Center, with Linda Lavin making her opera debut as the Old Woman and Jay Armstrong Johnson as the title character.
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OPERA V. MUSICAL THEATER: THE CASE FOR SWEENEY TODD
One way to make opera-lovers cringe is to tell them that The Phantom of the Opera is their favorite opera. The show features a classical singing style, a dramatic plot and even has “opera” in its name. But Andrew Lloyd Weber’s long-running favorite is, in fact, considered a musical.
Sweeney Todd is also considered a musical but one that is often performed by opera companies. The same is true for works like West Side Story, Show Boat, A Little Night Music and Candide, which Michigan Opera Theatre (MOT) produced in March. So what exactly is the difference?
Some will say that operas are completely sung through while musicals feature spoken dialogue in-between songs. However, productions on both sides don’t follow that rule: Les Misérables, Rent and Hamilton are completely sung through while operas like Carmen, The Magic Flute and The Daughter of the Regiment have spoken dialogue.
The reality is, the answer is not always clear. While the line is blurry, these are some primary distinctions between the two:
Focus
As a general rule, operas prioritize music over acting, and musicals prioritize acting and the overall story over singing.
“Both contain characters telling stories through music, whether singing, dancing, or playing an instrument,” said Karen Ziemba, a Tony-nominated Broadway performer who portrays Mrs. Lovett in MOT’s Sweeney Todd. “However, a performer must have a large, well-trained voice with nuance to play on an opera stage. There are well-trained vocalists in musical theater too, but acting takes precedence.”
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Why Classical Singers Are Leaving Opera for Musical Theatre
Musical theatre shows no signs of slowing down in the U.S. With it’s ever-growing popularity, CS reached out to five singers who recently switched from opera to musical theatre to discuss this change.
Heather Hill recently finished a four-year run as the Innkeeper’s Wife and Carlotta understudy in The Phantom of the Opera. She also performed in the 2012 Tony Award-winning revival of Porgy and Bess.
Lori L’Italien is on the voice faculty at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and serves as an assistant professor at Lasell College. Her credits include Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, Homeless Lady in A New Brain, and Lucille Frank in Parade.
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