Hamlet soliloquizing to Yorick's ribcage.

[bdar]

I have not read the script, seen a production, or even heard the score for the smash Broadway musical Urinetown...which, on some level, makes me a bad theatergoer and even moreso a bad Neo-Futurist. But additionally, it means I can't speak with any authority as to what is happening in this lawsuitI think there are some interesting questions being

Comments

[somebodystrange]

I remember when I was in high school drama club, and the playbooks we received included stage directions, set design notes, etc, etc, etc that were supposed to be helpful -- but instead became dogma to be slavishly followed. (I think that's what happens when fundamentalists do theatre.)

I was probably halfway through my theatre major at Valpo before things really became clear. I used to think that the only way for a director to make something "new" out of an old play was to do a complete overhaul and reinterpretation -- such as changing the entire era of a piece (a production of A Chorus Line at Valpo did this rather poorly, updating costumes and lines until references to "Steve McQueen" were actually replaced by "Harrison Ford". Ugh), or casting people against gender or race (I would have loved to have seen Patrick Stewart's Othello in which black and white were reversed

[somebodystrange]

Oh, and before I saw your first footnote, I was going to reference that particular movie.

[disenchant]

wow, that is a big can of worms! i can see all sorts of things this brings up--not only in theatre but in movies and music too.

i remember one things my creative writing teacher once said. bad writers borrow. great writers steal. the idea being if you are uncreative you merely borrow elements from other writers. but a great writer will take something and make it their own. i can see that applying to theater. merely duplicating things from a successful show reeks of laziness and uncreativeness. but stealing an idea and making it your own--isn't that the heart of following successful actions

[benchilada]

Seeing it Monday night at Parkland College...

[911939]

I did a production of Fiddler On the Roof in college. That's right, I did Fiddler in West Texas. How many actual Jewish folks in the cast? Zero. One Ukrainian girl, but she played the Fiddler, who never speaks. But that's not what this is about.

In Fiddler, productions are theoretically obligated by contract to reproduce Jerome Robbins' original choreography. That really sucked. Our director slavishly followed this, and honestly just tried to reproduce the movie as much as possible, and it was terrible.

I got to play Tevye, though. I mean, seriously, how many more times is my goyishe ass gonna get to play Tevye? That was awesome.

[frozenbitch]

but that doesn't mean that Contemporary Actor Y should be up onstage doing his Legendary Actor X impersonation

This has become a recent gripe of mine. I was supposed to see William Hurt as Prospero earlier this year; he had to bow out of the engagement, and instead I got to see some other actor doing his best William Hurt impression, right down to the strange bald cap that gave him the same hairline. Sheesh! Does this happen oftener than I realize?