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Willie “Big Eyes” Smith
Otis Spann
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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Bank robbery foiled when teller can’t read stickup note
A British man allegedly botched a
bank robbery because of a handwritten stickup note that was so sloppy the
teller couldn’t read it.
That would-be robbery was part of
a short-lived spree in East Sussex by 67-year-old Alan Slattery that included a
second failed stickup and one successful theft of $3,300, Sussex Police said in
a news release Wednesday.
The retiree tried to rob the
Nationwide Building Society on the morning of March 18 by slipping a note to
the teller – but he hightailed it out of there with no cash when the teller
couldn’t make out the writing, the release said.
Only after he was gone did staff
make out that the note said "your screen won’t stop what I’ve got just
hand over the 10s and 20s think about the customer’s (sic)."
The goofy crime was reminiscent
of a scene from the 1969 comedy film "Take the Money and Run," which
shows a bank robbery that goes wrong when the would-be robber argues with
tellers, a vice president and others about whether his stickup note says
"gun" or "gub."
But Slattery kept at it after his
first stickup went south, and on March 26 he slipped a note to a teller at
Nationwide Building Society who was able to read it – and turned over about
$3,300 cash, police stated.
Surveillance footage showed
Slattery boarding a bus afterward, and he was identified through the bus
company by the photo on his pass, according to police.
Slattery struck out one last time
before police charged him, though – this time at a NatWest bank on April 1, the
release said. He once again used a note, but this time the teller pushed back
and scared off Slattery who left the bank without taking anything, according to
police.
Police arrested Slattery walking
near his home later for robbery and attempted robbery, police stated. In his
house, they found "sticky labels" that matched one of his stickup
notes, the statement said.
"These incidents caused fear
and distress to both the employees working in the banks and to the wider
public," Detective Constable Jay Fair said in a statement.
"I’d like to thank all the
victims and witnesses who supported our investigation, and I’m pleased to see
the severity of the offenses reflected in the sentence handed out by the
court."
Callow
Callow means “lacking adult sophistication.” Often used to describe a young person who does not have much experience and does not know how to behave like an adult. Callow comes from calu, a word that meant "bald" in Middle English and Old English. By the 17th century, callow had come to mean "without feathers" and was applied to young birds not yet ready for flight. The term was also used for those who hadn't yet spread their wings in a figurative sense.
A remarakable story
This is a remarkable story. In
2017, a homeless man named Joshua Spriestersbach was standing in a long line
outside a Honolulu shelter. It was a miserably hot day, and Spriestersbach
hadn’t eaten in several days. Suddenly he fainted. The police were called, and
after they had roused him awake, Spriestersbach assumed he was being arrested
for sleeping on the sidewalk where he had passed out.
Spriestersbach, left and Castleberry, right
What happened next is odd. One of the cops who knew another homeless man named Thomas Castleberry mistook Spriestersbach for Castleberry and arrested him on an outstanding warrant for violating probation in a 2006 drug case.Spriestersbach and Castleberry
had never met, nor did Spriestersbach ever claim to be Castleberry, although
the arresting police officers lied and said he did. The chances that recently revived from the
sidewalk Spriestersbach could have come
up with an alias like Thomas Castleberry are remarkable.
That was the start of a two-year
nightmare. Spriestersbach was locked up in a state mental hospital and forced
to take psychiatric drugs and the more that Spriestersbach insisted he wasn’t
Castleberry, the more he was determined to be delusional and psychotic by the
hospital staff who kept him heavily medicated.
Finally, a young psychiatrist
listened to Spriestersbach and determined he might be telling the truth. The
psychiatrist called the police and had them come to the hospital and take
Spriestersbach fingerprints and photograph and compare to their files. Sure
enough, they were holding the wrong man. The real Castleberry was in prison in
Alaska.
The hospital ad the police held
an emergency meeting and decided to secretly release Spriestersbach, who had a
series of mental health issues. He was returned to the streets without an
explanation, cash, or a place to stay.
A homeless shelter contacted his
family, who took Spriestersbach to live with his sister on a ten-acre property
in Vermont, which, Spriestersbach, understandably, refuses to leave.
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Randy's Dandy Coaster Castle by Alexander Perez
A dark comedy about a run-down amusement park in the Florida panhandle and the people who run the place.
It touches on a plethora of topics but mainly the psychological toll of the low wage labor market, employer/employee power dynamics, as well as the differing sociopolitical perspectives between first wave Cuban immigrants and the generation that came after them.
The play runs August 19 - 21 @ 7:30 pm; August 22 @ 1:00 & 7:00 pm; August 25-28 @ 7:30pm; August 29 @ 1:00 & 7:00 pm
IRT Theater, 154 Christopher St, New York City.
More:
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
FutureFest 2022
Entry must be an original work (NO musicals or plays for children) that has not been published or produced where admission was charged prior to FutureFest 2022. Staged readings/workshop productions are not necessarily disqualifying factors.
Should your script be selected and produced as one of the six finalists, you must be available to attend, in person, the weekend festival (July 15-17, 2022) in Dayton, Ohio and participate in all events. Finalists must acknowledge the Dayton Playhouse when script is published. The winning playwright awards the Dayton Playhouse the option to produce the winning play as part of its main stage season royalty free.
AWARDS
A $1000 honorarium will be awarded to the winning playwright; runners-up each receive $100.
The Dayton Playhouse provides the six finalists travel (within the continental U.S.) to Dayton and housing for FutureFest weekend.
***
Players Workshop seeks plays for its Ninth Annual International 10-Minute Play Festival, Diez Minutos. This fully-staged festival will be in English and will take place in March of 2022 in the international arts center of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — a World Heritage Site brimming with charm, history, and culture. San Miguel was recently voted Conde Nast Traveler Magazine "Best City in the World.” In 2017, readers of Travel – Leisure Magazine voted it the #1 city in the world to visit.
***
Fantasy Theatre Factory in Miami, Florida, understands that black female playwrights are underserved when it comes to the production of their work. We are holding a call for black female playwrights from the United States to submit monologues and short plays that reflect their personal experience, their dreams, joys and hopes.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** BOOKS -> PLAYS ***
There are a lot of famous movies that were made from plays, but there are a lot of amazing plays that have been based on books. These days, everything seems to be based (even loosely) on something else. But this isn't always a bad thing. Many books lend themselves well to the stage, as evidence by the plays on this list. What are the best plays based on books?
The plays on this list span genres and production styles. They include dramas, comedies, and romances. Did you know that some of the most famous plays in history were based on novels, autobiographies, or other books? It’s no wonder they're on this list since they’re based on stories we all know and love – stories that have actually made a significant impact on the literary world as well as the world of the stage.
The plays listed here have been ranked by the community as the best. This list features the best plays based on books including, Les Miserables, Ben Hur, A Christmas Carol, Young Frankenstein, Kite Runner, Albert Speer, and War Horse. Vote up the best plays based on books below and see where the plays you think are the best rank!
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***
Before heading out to talk to Mike Poulton about adapting Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the stage, I pop the two books on the scales. The hardback copies of Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prizewinning novels weigh in at around a kilogram each: not just a workout for the mind, then. These are epic texts. “The audiobook of Wolf Hall is 24 hours,” Poulton wryly observes.
No wonder Poulton hesitated when first asked whether they could be adapted. “Probably not,” was his initial response. But Thomas Cromwell, the central character in the two novels, is nothing if not persuasive. Mantel herself has observed that “from the moment I started writing Wolf Hall, the characters were fighting to be off the page”. And so, three years and nine drafts after that initial inquiry, Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn et al are to tread the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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200 years of Jane Austen: six times Austen's works were adapted for the stage
(July 18, 2017) marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, but her novels live on. The BBC's Big Read, which polled the nation on their favourite novels, had Pride and Prejudice as the UK's second favourite book after JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings at number one and Emma features at number nine in the Guardian's top 100 books of all time. So it comes as no surprise that theatres are keen to adapt Austen's work for the stage. Here's our list of some of the best ones in recent years.
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"We express who we are not just by telling stories but by re-telling the stories of others, emphasizing different details, putting our own spin on things," says writer/director Aaron Posner. "The re-telling of stories is a basic human need."
But one particular way of re-telling stories, turning literature into theater, is especially tricky. In some ways, classic and popular novels provide ideal source material for plays — familiar titles, characters and settings, thoroughly developed stories, proven appeal. But the two forms work by different rules and reach us in different ways. The love a reader has for a book quickly can turn bitter if the stage version doesn't fit the version in her imagination.
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***
Theatre has been adapting books since time immemorial. Many famous plays, whether musicals, dramas, or comedies, are based on books. Successful theatrical adaptations convey the essence of the story, even if the script differs slightly from the book. Going by both, the number of first-time productions and revivals we see every year, adapting plays from popular books seems to be a recipe for success.
This is a list of 10 famous plays that you may not know were adapted from books
Cabaret
This ever-green musical is based on the novel, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. The original 1996 Broadway Musical won 8 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
The book is written as a series of six connected short stories and novellas. While the book tells the story from Isherwood’s perspective, in the play a character by the name of Cliff Bradshaw replaces him. The story, set in 1930s Berlin, describes a group of people whom the narrator meets during the rise of the Nazis. Nazism is an important theme of the play and the book, as all the characters, in one way or another, are affected by it.
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***
How many of Shakespeare’s plays can we say are wholly original to him and not based on a pre-existing work?
Two, I think. In the first case, we haven’t found a source for the main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, Pyramus and Thisbe derive from Ovid; you can find precedents for certain scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And he’d done lovers crossed before—say, in Venus and Adonis or Two Gentlemen of Verona. But we haven’t found a source for Midsummer’s mixing of the love plot, the fairy plot, and the rude mechanicals plot. That seems totally original.
The other one is The Tempest. While there are narratives of loss in romance and of shipwreck everywhere from the Greek romances through to the Roman and the Italian, we haven’t found any one book that we can run through and tabulate where Shakespeare wanted this, didn’t want that, and contradicted this—like we can with Julius Caesar and Plutarch’s Lives, for instance. These two plays are wholly original.
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***
All the World’s a Stage, But Only Some Novels Become Plays
We purchased Broadway tickets a few days ago to see a December performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, which led me to think about novels that have become plays or musicals.
Plenty of novels inspire movie adaptations, but fewer such books are turned into plays — with one reason being that there are of course more major films made than major plays staged. Also, certain elements are needed for a novel-to-play transition to have a chance to work: It helps if the novels are well-known, well-written, filled with great dialogue, dramatic, plot-oriented, and graced with memorable protagonists; and it also helps if theatrical productions feature high-profile actresses and actors. Some luck doesn’t hurt, either.
The acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird production, which will reopen this fall along with various other Broadway plays after the long COVID shutdown, first featured movie notable Jeff Daniels as attorney Atticus Finch. Daniels will return to that role when the play resumes October 5, and is scheduled to stay until January 2. Harper Lee’s iconic novel had previously been performed as a play for several decades in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama — an example of how a number of fiction books have inspired local or regional theater productions.
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The great Lester Young (in my continuing to get away from two-beat rock and roll)
(From Wikipedia) Lester Willis
Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), nicknamed "Pres" or
"Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and occasional
clarinetist.
Coming to prominence while a
member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young was one of the most influential
players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young
played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using what
one critic called "a free-floating style, wheeling and diving like a gull,
banking with low, funky riffs that pleased dancers and listeners alike".
Known for his hip, introverted
style, he invented or popularized much of the hipster jargon which came to be
associated with the music.
Blue lights
In the year 2000, Glasgow, Scotland, installed blue
streetlights in certain parts of the city to make them more aesthetically
pleasing, but, shortly afterward they noticed that crime went down in those
areas.
In 2005, a city in
Japan installed blue lights in high crime areas, and crime in the area
decreased by 9%.
A Tokyo railroad
company installed blue lights at train stations experiencing a high number of
suicides, and virtually overnight suicide attempts went to zero.
The so-called Blue
Light effect is not 100% scientifically proven but there seems to be some minor
correlation between the lights and lower crime rates. One theory is that blue
light are subconsciously associated with police presence or maybe blue lights
have a calming effect since they are also used to treat seasonal depression.
The purpose of education
The
purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world
for himself, to make his own decisions. James A. Baldwin
NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Stairwell Theater presents
Henry IV: Part One by William Shakespeare
August 20, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29
The Old Stone House, Brooklyn
What comes of incessant war?
The greatest king England has ever known is dead. Now, during the bloody conflict of the One Hundred Years' War, England enters into a dangerous transfer of power, just as a new champion arises on the French side. Can the English Lord Talbot defeat the young upstart, Joan of Arc?
The first of a planned four plays running through Richard III, Henry VI: Part 1 features puppetry, music, and daring maneuvers. Join Stairwell at Park Slope's Old Stone House as they interrogate the subject of foreign wars - and the havoc they wreak on the world.
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
More than any other creative genre, drama has suffered the hardest during the Covid-19 pandemic. With the closure of theaters worldwide as in plagues of the past, playhouses have been forced to find new ways to reproduce the magic of live theater by going virtual. For smaller venues lacking the resources, many have closed temporarily or permanently shuttered. For playwrights, this reality translates to fewer opportunities to showcase their work, and the virus places in peril the future of live theater and new works.
We seek an anthology to showcase works by playwrights examining Covid-19 in all its permutations.
We are looking for dramatic works (short plays, performance pieces, monologues, etc.) from diverse playwrights worldwide that speak to the deaths, isolation, social, political, and economic upheaval that have followed in the wake of this pandemic.
***
In an effort to expand our mission to address this erasure, NY Classical is embarking on a three-year initiative to develop two new, original plays for production in our 2024 and 2025 seasons. We are seeking plays that explore new ways of viewing the “classics,” expand our ideas of what “classics” can be, and challenge the power structures that undergird the notion of “classics.”
These New Visions can include, but are not limited to…
Adaptation/Translation. Examples include: Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman and Herbert Siguenza’s El Henry.
Response/Subversion. Examples include: Branden Jacobs Jenkins’s An Octoroon and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Prequel/Sequel. Examples include: Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2
Plays that engage with history and bring forgotten events to life. Examples include: John Guare’s A Free Man of Color and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean
Plays that engage with written stories beyond the stage, including novels, poems and poetry collections, and journals that exists in the public domain. Examples include: Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice and Kristin Laurence’s Little Women
Plays that derive from oral histories, rituals, and other forms of creating, knowing, remembering, and documenting the world beyond the written word. Examples include: Ondinnok’s Rabinal Achi and SPAC’s Tenshu Monogatari.
***
The Lionheart Theatre Company is looking for interested playwrights to submit short, 10-minute plays for consideration for Lionheart’s October Halloween play festival “Bewitching.”
Please note that “Bewitching” will be a live, staged performance. Lionheart is looking for plays that focus on common “spooky” themes, such as horror, the paranormal, the macabre, and general chills and thrills appropriate for late October.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** THEATER CANCELLATIONS ***
The Warner Theatre in Torrington has canceled a planned production of the historical drama “I Am My Own Wife” after criticism from the transgender community over the casting of a cisgender male in the lead role.
Complaints on Facebook about the Warner’s production of the one-actor show said trans voices should tell trans stories, echoing an ongoing debate about representation in the arts world.
“It is incredibly damaging and harmful to trans people to cast cis men in trans women’s roles,” Embrys Graham, a genderfluid theater artist, wrote in emails to the Warner. “It perpetuates the damaging idea that trans women are ‘men in dresses.’ This concept has been the cause of hatred and violence against trans women.”
The play, produced by Long Wharf Theater with a nonbinary actor in 2020, tells the true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who lived openly as a transgender woman through the Nazi and East German Communist regimes. Long Wharf was heralded for employing not just a nonbinary actor but an almost entirely nonbinary or transgender creative team amid a national discussion of cisgender actors portraying transgender characters.
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News is coming out of Lancaster, PA today that the Superintendent canceled an upcoming high school production of the musical “Hairspray” over alleged complaints about insensitive language in the script.
McCaskey High School students hoping to perform the show this May are disappointed to see that Superintendent Damaris Rau pulled the plug on the show, just over a week after auditions were held.
Ms. Rau told local news,
“This is not the appropriate time to put on a musical like this,” Rau said, referring to the racial strife over the summer as well as the mental health impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on children.
“Kids are too raw” right now, she said.
Ms. Rau explained that after she had received an email written a group of students to the principal describing their concerns, she read the script herself and made the call to cancel the show and advise the directors to change the show.
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***
A Minnesota theater has canceled an upcoming performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "Cinderella" over concerns regarding the cast's lack of diversity.
In a release, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres said its staff and leaders "believe unapologetically" in their decision to replace the performance with one "Footloose!"
"It was 98 percent white," Michael Brindisi, the theater's artistic director, told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press. "That doesn’t work with what we’re saying we’re going to do."
The statement said the theater is still "looking forward to bringing it to our stage in the future."
"But we as a company decided our original casting didn’t go far enough in our commitment, and instead of waiting another full year to implement these important changes, we chose now," it said.
The theater also announced new diversity protocols it will be implementing going forward, including bringing Black, Indigenous and other artists of color to analyze future productions before they begin the casting process.
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***
Shakespeare on the Green won’t take place again this year amid ongoing controversy over racial and diversity issues with the group that organizes the event.
Nebraska Shakespeare’s board of directors announced the cancellation Friday, citing a lack of staff to produce the 35th anniversary season. The event usually is held in late June and early July at Elmwood Park. It was canceled last year because of the pandemic.
“A number of our company have resigned from the productions due to a belief that we are not making enough progress improving diversity, equity and inclusion for the organization,” board member Adrian Blake said in a prepared statement.
Blake also cited COVID-19 as a factor in the cancellation.
Members of the theater community have been concerned about several moves by the company. They say its social media posts have been racially insensitive and that Nebraska Shakespeare staff and board haven’t acknowledged the Black Lives Matter movement, among other things.
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The creators of the show Hedwig and the Angry Inch have weighed in to a casting row that led to the producers of an upcoming Australian production pulling the show from January’s Sydney festival.
In a statement on Wednesday, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Task said they did not believe the title role was a trans character, and the role should be “open to anyone who can tackle it and, more importantly, anyone who needs it.”
The January festival announced the postponement of rock musical and seminal queer show on Tuesday, following a flood of complaints over the casting of a cis male as Hedwig.
The Packed to the Rafters actor Hugh Sheridan was announced to be playing the complex genderqueer character in early November.
Sheridan, who revealed in October that he has been with men and women but eschews labels when it comes to sexual orientation, was to become the latest in a long line of queer cis men to play the role, including its creator Mitchell.
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***
What started as a local issue became toxic for students when the cancellation of their spring play “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” went viral this week.
The play was canceled in January after Ithaca High School students raised concerns about diversity and inclusion. This week, students involved have received significant backlash after national news coverage prompted a flood of derogatory comments and even death threats, that have led to an increased police presence at the school.
When the cast list revealed that the role of Esmeralda, the female lead popularly portrayed by a woman of color in the Disney version of the retelling, had gone to a white student, several students banded together this winter to speak out, noting their experiences with color-blind casting in the ICSD theater program.
“I was so excited when they announced the show,” said Prachi Ruina, who initially tried out for the part. “I just thought ‘finally, there’s going to be a girl of color up there on the stage’.”
Ruina, 16, and other students at the school — Maddi Carroll, 17, Ari Cummings, 16, and Eamon Nunn-Makepeace, 14 — created a list of demands for the school district and theater department in hopes of diversifying general casting practices and creating a culture of diversity. After several meetings and community discussion, however, the school district canceled the play.
In the few weeks since the cancellation, students had been hoping to work out plans for a new spring production. Instead, those plans were interrupted by national threats directed to the students after the story went viral.
Fox News picked up the article and headlined it with “High school cancels musical after white student lands lead role.” As of Thursday, there were more than 9,000 comments on the article. Other outlets, including Breitbart and The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist site, have also picked up the story.
On the message board site 4Chan, the article from Fox News was posted several times, eliciting dozens of racist comments. The students’ Facebook page was shared and anonymous posters commented saying people should “dox” them, which usually refers to releasing personal information about people to harass them.
More...
***
Ultimately, the "is Hamilton canceled?" debate raises a lot of questions that are difficult to answer—ones both specific to the project itself, and about any piece of art that's arguably problematic, yet loved by many. Twitter, where you'll find an ocean of "if you like this bad thing, you are also by extension bad" opinions, alongside the valid and thoughtful Hamilton critiques, is one place to broach that conversation—but it shouldn't be the only place we're having it.
A lot has happened since the musical was first created and staged—aka, the years before the 2016 election. And in a time when non-Black people are being encouraged to consider our own roles in upholding structural racism, Miranda does seem to be trying to do that himself: On May 31, he apologized for not denouncing white supremacy and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement on the official Hamilton social media platforms earlier.
"As the writer of this show, I take responsibility and apologize for my part in this moral failure," he said in the video. "Hamilton doesn't exist without the black and brown artists who created and revolutionized and changed the world through the culture, music and language of hip-hop, Literally, the idea of the show doesn't exist without the brilliant black and brown artists in our cast, crew and production team who breathe life into this story every time it's performed."
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