See how that works?

 


 

 

The first people dictatorships make disappear when they take over are people like me and you, writers.

Think it can’t happen here?  

Joe Rogan has some people up in arms. They want his podcast removed from Spotify, and, if Spotify doesn’t remove Rogan, they’re going to remove their content from the service.

That’s their right.

What isn’t their right is their intent to censor Rogan so that you and I can no longer choose

 what we want to listen to if they don't like what you listen to.






* OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

  



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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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/

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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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