The Ten-Minute Musicals Project 2022
Stories 1.0 is the full-length musical comprised of works selected in the first
several rounds. Several works in Stories 1.0 were workshopped in San Francisco,
New York City, Miami, and Nashville over the years. Individual segments have
been independently workshopped in Dallas, Chicago, London, and Boston.
SEEKING: Complete original stage musicals which play between seven and twenty
minutes. Works which have been previously produced are acceptable, as are
excerpts from full-length shows, if they can stand up on their own.
***
Fresh Words-An International Literary Magazine is accepting submissions for
Special One Act Play Anthology 'Hello Godot!'. The One Act Play must have GODOT
(Reference 'Waiting for Godot') as a character OR motif OR there should be
recurring reference of GODOT in the work.
***
The Decameron Project - LA, in partnership with International Arts Media, LLC,
is seeking new one minute plays and screenplays for in-person and virtual
presentations.
A 100 x1 min play festival is being planned for fall 2022 in Los Angeles, while
some plays will be presented virtually.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site
at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** MOLIERE'S 400th BIRTHDAY ***
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, was born on January 15, 1622.
Born into money, he spent years working as an actor in Paris, before picking up
a pen to create some of the best-known plays in French history. Borrowing
elements from the Italian Comedia dell’arte, Molière’s plays lovingly poke fun
at the French aristocracy, and were so beloved by French society that they
earned him patronage from nobility and royalty, even King Louis XIV and his
brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans. He is often thought to have invented the
“comedy of manners,” a dramatic genre which satirizes the artificial cult of
courtesies constructed by the well-heeled. The playwright remains so
influential, long after his death in 1673, that French is often referred to as
“the language of Molière.”
Some of Molière’s more famous works include Tartuffe, about a vagrant who fakes
divine wisdom in order to be taken into the home of a wealthy family; and The
Misanthrope, about an aristocrat who struggles to reject the hypocrisies of his
mien while still falling prey to their attractions. These and many more will be
brought back to the stage this year as France celebrates the playwright’s 400th
birthday.
At the center of this project is the Comédie-Française, one of the only state
theaters in France, and the oldest active theater company in the world, dating
all the way back to 1680. Since 1799, the troupe has been housed in the Salle
Richelieu, which was originally built in 1790 to be an opera house, and is
located in Paris’s central 1st arrondissement.
More...
https://frenchly.us/france-goes-wild-for-molieres-400th-anniversary-with-months-of-plays/
***
If there’s a playwright every French-speaking student has studied, it’s
Molière! It’s impossible to not have read the plays Les Fourberies de Scapin
(“The Impostures of Scarpin”) or Le Médecin malgré lui (“The Doctor in Spite of
Himself”): They’re on the syllabus at every school! And for good reason: The
name Molière is deeply connected to the French language, to the point of being
considered its greatest ambassador. But who was he? On the occasion of
Molière’s 400th birthday, let’s revisit his life, his works and the heritage he
left to posterity.
More...
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/is-french-still-the-language-of-moliere
***
The Molière quarrel is immediately keyed by the celebration of his
four-hundredth birthday, or more exactly the four-hundredth anniversary of his
baptism—as with Shakespeare, that’s the first date we have for him—this past
January 15th. Last year, the actor Francis Huster passionately made the case
for the reinterment of Molière within the Panthéon, Molière’s remains having
had a long and slightly hair-raising cultural history of their own. Denied
burial by the Church with any pomp upon his death—which occurred on an evening
when, on stage, during a production of “The Imaginary Invalid,” he had
portrayed a man faking his death, a joke only he could have written—as
punishment for being an actor, his remains were discreetly interred in a church
graveyard in Paris. Then, during the Revolution, hard as it is to believe,
Molière’s coffin was dug up and, it is said, shown off in Paris, as a kind of
morbid celebration of his modest origins and as a rebuke to the Church for its
previous persecution of him.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/moliere-to-the-pantheon
***
But Molière is not just any playwright, and his failure to be inducted into the
Panthéon is not just any fait divers. During the 17th century, the
Parisian-born and bred Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who took the stage name Molière,
reeled off an improbably long run of impossibly knee-slapping (and often
heartbreaking) plays, ranging from Tartuffe, or the Imposter and The
Misanthrope to The Miser and The Bourgeois Gentleman. His works have been
so widely translated and performed that just as English is known as the
“language of Shakespeare,” French is called “the language of Molière.” (So much
so that, a few years ago, several regional governments in France imposed French
as the principal language of communication at all public work sites. The law,
contested by the European Union and struck down by the central government, was
dubbed “la clause Molière.”)
More...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/moliere-pantheon-honor-macron-denial.html
***
Unfortunately, one of the disadvantages of having your statue literally placed
on a pedestal in the center of your country’s capital city is that your
theatrical output will inevitably be regarded with solemn reverence and with
the utmost seriousness, leading to productions that try to squeeze every drop
of tragic import from each scene. I have seen many a turgid production of
Molière’s theater in France, where the audience has maintained a mournful
silence, seemingly not even daring to laugh, just in case their laughter might
be mistaken for frivolity. Luckily, in recent years, theater directors have
begun to recognize both that Molière’s plays are hilarious and that laughter
and profundity are not mutually exclusive.
More...
https://www.parisupdate.com/moliere/
***
TARTUFFE
https://youtu.be/VKm7_CFNIn8?t=3
Tartuffe,
comedy in five acts by Molière, produced in 1664 and published in French in
1669 as Le Tartuffe; ou, l’imposteur (“Tartuffe; or, The Imposter”). It was
also published in English as The Imposter.
Tartuffe is a sanctimonious scoundrel who, professing extreme piety, is
taken into the household of Orgon, a wealthy man. Under the guise of
ministering to the family’s spiritual and moral needs, he almost destroys
Orgon’s family. Elmire, Orgon’s wife, sees through Tartuffe’s wicked hypocrisy
and exposes him.
--
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