PLAYWRIGHTS ON PARK is an exciting artistic
endeavor for Playhouse on Park. Our mission is to develop and produce original
plays, to foster emerging and established playwrights, and to become a leader
in new play development. We aim to help establish the Greater Hartford Area as
a premiere destination for the cultivation and exploration of innovative
theatrical work. Playwrights selected as part of the Playwrights on Park
Reading Series will have a day of rehearsal, followed by a reading of their
play and a talkback with the audience.
***
Onstage/Offstage (www.onstageoffstage.org) is
looking for (4) 10-12 minute plays to produce and air on its podcast. The theme
for 2022 is "Pets." The play must stand on its own as a fully
dramatic issue between its characters and feature PETS as a critical plot element
and/or character.
We will consider all plays equally based on
their merit, but we especially encourage writers who identify as female or
BIPOC to submit.
***
The Lucille Lortel Theatre's NYC Public High
School Playwriting Fellowship will support diverse young writers and create an
awareness of playwriting as a career. The opportunities provided by this
program will encourage NYC public high school students to become the next
generation of playwrights.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other
opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** PULITZER! ***
Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals
OF THEE I SING had the longest run for any
original Gershwin show; was acclaimed by the critics for being the first
intelligent musical comedy; was the first musical to be published (by Knopf) in
book form; and was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
Infamously, the prize was awarded only to Ira, Kaufman, and Ryskind.
George Gershwin was left out, because the prize was considered to be a
"literary" honor--an oversight partially redressed by this year's
honorary Pulitzer Prize to Gershwin. By the time the show was nearly a
year into its run, FDR had been elected and his command of the issues, his
honesty with the American people, and his bold social and economic had programs
rendered much of the satire moot. Kaufman and Co. were quite savvy in
deftly not mentioning the names of any political parties in the musical.
It keeps the show timeless, in a way, but then again, what really keeps
the show timeless is the absurdity of participatory democracy.
More...
https://www.georgeskaufman.com/play-catalogue/15-play-catalogue/library-of-america-collection/15-of-thee-i-sing.html
***
By the time SOUTH PACIFIC closed its run on
Broadway, after five years and nineteen hundred and twenty-five performances,
it had done its work in the world. The 1949 musical—the first show that Richard
Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein produced as well as wrote—played to an estimated
three and a half million people. It was the second-ever musical to win the
Pulitzer Prize for drama, matching the Pulitzer for literature that James
Michener won the previous year, for “Tales of the South Pacific,” from which
Hammerstein and the director Joshua Logan adapted the show. The cast album was
the No. 1 album for sixty-nine consecutive weeks. There were “South Pacific”
scarves, “South Pacific” lipsticks, “South Pacific” neckties—even fake “South
Pacific” tickets, sold as status symbols.
But the show’s defining impact was not
financial; it was subliminal. At the zenith of America’s postwar power—with
abundance and intolerance at loggerheads within the nation—the ravishing score
reminded America of its best self, and gave the fraught fifties a mantra of
promise. “If you don’t have a dream, / How you gonna have a dream come true?”
it asked.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/14/a-thing-called-hope
***
If you like musicals about historical New
York-based politicians and the women they love, then boy are you in luck! No,
I’m not talking about Hamilton. (Despite what you may have heard, not
everything is about Hamilton!) Nope, I’m talking about Fiorello Henry La
Guardia, the 99th Mayor of New York who presided over the city for three terms
from 1934-45. That’s right, FIORELLO! is coming back the New York theater.
The Berkshire Theater Group will mount an
off-Broadway production of the musical in September. While there have been
productions worldwide since its 1959 premiere, it has never returned to
Broadway. The last time it played New York was in 2013 for less than a week as
a concert at City Center Encores!, a series that revisits old musicals, both
underrated and forgotten classics. (Fiorello! is solidly the latter category;
you can tell the musical is old-fashioned because it has an exclamation in its
title without a hint of irony.) The original Broadway run starred Tom Bosley as
the mayor, who earned a Tony for the role (and did you know Bosley was
Jewish?). Danny Rutigliano starred in the 2013 concert.
More...
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bock-and-harnicks-fiorello-returning-to-new-york
***
In 1955, when Shepherd Mead’s book HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY
TRYING became a huge success, playwright Willie Gilbert and neurosurgeon Jack
Weinstock created a dramatic adaptation. But the play remained unproduced until
1960, when theatrical agent Abe Newborn brought it to the attention of
producers, Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, who thought it could work as a Broadway
musical. Feuer and Martin had had a huge success with “Guys and Dolls” in 1950
and asked the authors of that show, bookwriter Abe Burrows and
composer/lyricist Frank Loesser, to write the adaptation. Rehearsals began in
August, 1961, with Abe Burrows directing and Frank Loesser co-producing.
Robert Morse was cast as Finch, the ambitious window washer, with Charles
Nelson Reilly as Bud Frump (the boss’s equally ambitious nephew), Bonnie Scott
as Rosemary (a secretary with her sites on Finch), and 1930s recording star
Rudy Vallee as J.B. Biggley (the stuffy philandering company president).
More...
https://frankloesser.com/library/how-to-succeed-in-business-without-really-trying/
***
For anyone who has not been paying attention to the world lately— an
understandable attitude— A CHORUS LINE is a musical conceived, choreographed
and directed by Michael Bennett, and produced by Joseph Papp for the New York
Shakespeare Festival. It started in the late spring of this year at the Public
Theater, and midsummer moved uptown to the Shubert. Previews and a musicians’
strike prevented its official opening—perhaps inauguration would be a better
word—until last night.
It remains at the Shubert what it was at the Public—one of the greatest
musicals ever to hit Broadway, and quite possibly the simplest and the most
imaginative.
It starts on a bare stage and it pretty l much stays there. AL the back of the
stage are some revolving mirrors. At the front are some movable footlights. On
the stage are a group of gypsies (which is what Broadway calls its chorus
people), a director and a dance cap tain. The scene is an audition. No—the
musical is the audit:0d. These kids (Kids? some of them are now over,30 and
know it) are auditioning for chorus line—a chorus line for some mythic musical.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/20/archives/a-chorus-line-a-musical-to-sing-about-for-years.html
***
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony- and
Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 musical, had a rather odd premise. The show
imagined the fractured interior life of Georges Seurat, the 19th-century
post-Impressionist artist known to most for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte. (The work should be a familiar one to fans of
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, especially.)
Lapine, who wrote and directed Sunday, was new to the musical-theater scene
then, having only worked with the composer William Finn on March of the
Falsettos; while Sondheim had already found huge critical success as a
composer-lyricist with Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Their unlikely collaboration yielded
one of the great Broadway shows of the latter 20th century, featuring important
lead performances from Mandy Patinkin (as Seurat) and Bernadette Peters (as his
frustrated, illiterate mistress, Dot); yet mounting Sunday was not without its
difficulties. From an early workshop at Playwrights Horizon to a rocky
Off-Broadway run and difficult transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, the
show was constantly in flux—and its cast and crew, frequently at odds. Lapine
captures all of this in his new book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim
and I Created Sunday in the Park With George, talking through the show with
virtually every living person who had a part in it: actors, producers, costume
designers, musicians, et al. It also lays out the beginnings of Sondheim and
Lapine’s creative partnership, which would later bring us Into the Woods and
Passion.
Here, we look at seven of the book’s most intriguing revelations.
Mandy Patinkin reacted as any normal person would to first meeting Bernadette
Peters—he freaked out.
Never mind the fact that he had just won a Tony for Evita; Patinkin was “just a
fan” of Peters’s when they met in rehearsal—she had, at that point, become a
major star of both stage (On the Town; Mack and Mabel) and screen (The Jerk;
Annie)—and he behaved accordingly. “I remember she walked in the room and my
heart just went crazy from the moment I set eyes on her,” Patinkin says.
More...
https://www.vogue.com/article/sunday-in-the-park-with-george-7-riveting-revelations
***
RENT, the rock musical respectfully frozen in draft mode since the sudden and
shocking death of its creator Jonathan Larson before its final off-Broadway
dress rehearsal in 1996, has never really been allowed to grow up.
Its lyrics swing wildly between glorious and half-baked and the book frequently
loses its focus. Like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar before it, however, Rent
endures in the grand tradition of rock musicals: its heart is bigger than its
problems; its music moves under your skin and moves you.
This loose La Bohème adaptation about struggling artists who build and lose a
found family over the course of a year in Manhattan’s East Village has always
been scrappy and loose. In Shaun Rennie’s production for the Sydney Opera
House, there’s still mess to the musical, but this time it’s infused with
enough gravity and thoughtful adjustments that help Rent grow up just enough to
soar.
More...
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jan/03/rent-review-scrappy-new-york-musical-grows-up-and-finds-its-heart-and-soul
***
NEXT TO NORMAL is a Tony-and-Pulitzer-award-winning rock musical with book and
lyrics by Brian Yorkey and music by Tom Kitt. The story centers around a
Dysfunctional Family consisting of bipolar depressive housewife Diana, who
suffers from delusional episodes, her husband Dan, who has been struggling with
taking care of her on and off for the past sixteen years, their charming but
unruly son Gabe, and their disaffected musician daughter Natalie. Also involved
are Natalie's on-and-off boyfriend, Henry, and Diana's doctors, Dr. Fine and
Dr. Madden.
Originally, it was developed as a ten-minute short called Feeling Electric,
inspired by a news report Yorkey saw about electro-convulsive therapy.
More...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/NextToNormal
***
It’s the question most asked of theater critics these days: “Is HAMILTON really
that good?”
A slew of celebs, including a texting Madonna, saw the musical last winter in
its world-premiere engagement at the Public Theater, Barack Obama and Joe Biden
saw it just last month in previews, Stephen Sondheim gave his blessing, calling
it a “breakthrough.” After all that buildup, it’s almost anticlimactic to announce
that “Hamilton” finally opened Thursday on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre.
Yes, “Hamilton” is that good, and the still youthful Lin-Manuel Miranda can be
mentioned in the same sentence with Sondheim and even Cole Porter. No need to
go into all the lyrics here, but Miranda has a syllable-by-syllable rhyme for
“pseudonym,” and many other words, that is absolutely delicious.
More...
https://www.thewrap.com/hamilton-broadway-review-the-founding-fathers-never-looked-or-sounded-so-cool/
***
Of all the terrible times to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, the worst was
surely April 2020. Every theater was shuttered and dark when playwright Michael
R. Jackson's shattering debut musical, A STRANGE LOOP, took the prize.
"It was pretty surreal," Jackson admits. "My producers got on
Zoom and got everyone involved on the production together, and they sent me
some champagne."
More than a year later, A Strange Loop is finally gearing up for Broadway.
Jackson sat down for an interview with NPR at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in
Washington D.C. where the show recently opened to rave reviews. It explores a
young playwright's meta-journey—a "portrait of a portrait of an
artist," in the words of the main character.
"It's about a black, queer man writing a musical about a black, queer man
who's writing a musical about a black queer man who's writing a musical about a
black queer man," the playwright's stand-in, Usher, explains to a
sympathetic Broadway tourist. Usher is literally a theater usher, showing
out-of-towners to their seats to The Lion King—a job Jackson actually held
while writing this musical. (Don't for a minute think it's accidental that a
playwright whose name is Michael Jackson chose Usher as a sort of nom de
théâtre.)
More...
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/11/1061797615/pulitzer-prize-musical-a-strange-loop-broadway
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