NYCPlaywrights October 22, 2022
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NYCPlaywrights
Oct 22, 2022, 5:02:34 PM10/22/22
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Szeged Contemporary Dance Company presents: Carmina Burana
Making their first trip across the Atlantic, Szeged Contemporary Dance Company / Szegedi Kortárs Balett (SCDC), Hungary’s leading contemporary dance company, will make their U.S. debut. Presented in partnership with Liszt Institute, New York’s Hungarian Cultural Center, SCDC will bring their highly acclaimed adaptation of Carmina Burana to the U.S. The work has been performed 350 times, with more than 180,000 viewers worldwide, sold out audiences, and standing ovations across Europe, Mexico and the Middle East.
Carl Orff’s monumental musical masterpiece is brought to life as a spectacular dance-theater adaptation. Carmina Burana vividly captures the common fears and joys of an imaginary barbarian community as it keeps fighting for its own survival and humanity through mysterious rituals until its very last breath. Fate sometimes brings love, joy, and sometimes brings sadness or death. A girl whose life was meant to be short can feel true happiness for a moment, when love makes her forget all the bad things, and makes her believe in a life that can be different, that can be better. But Fortune is fickle and cruel.
EVENT DETAILS:
November 5-6 2022 at The Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater - 405 West 55th St. at 9th Avenue. Saturday at 7:00 PM, Sunday at 7:00 PM
HEALTH AND SAFETY:
For this event, all guests will be required to wear a face covering at all times in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
PLEASE NOTE
RSVP priority will be held until 10 mins to showtime, at which time we will release all seats to walk up guests.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/szeged-contemporary-dance-company-presents-carmina-burana-tickets-441927816997?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
ONLINE CLASSES STARTING NEXT WEEK: First Draft and Kinetic Energy Workshop Online at Primary Stages ESPA!
Start a First Draft or jumpstart your creativity with our Kinetic Energy Workshop. Faculty includes CRYSTAL SKILLMAN (Writer, King Kirby, Rain and Zoe Save the World), WINTER MILLER (Writer, In Darfur at The Public Theater, No One Is Forgotten at Rattlestick), and many other award-winning writers who provide practical skills and expert guidance in a collaborative atmosphere.
Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available.
http://primarystages.org/espa/writing
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Fleas on the Dog seeks submissions for Issue 13 to be published January 2023.
For the Playwrights: All of the plays you’ll find in each issue of Fleas On The Dog are considered primarily as pieces of dramatic literature, living their lives, for the moment, strictly on the page. Some pieces are more or less finished, some will probably see additional revision but everyone involved the making theatre – especially playwrights and directors - know that a script is only the pretext for an embodied life on stage or film. And as theatre-making is a collective effort, scripts in production often go through a long revision process informed by directors, actors, technical theatre specialists, et al. Every bit of dialogue you’ve written, every cue, pause or note on stage logistics, and the minute details of your take on sets and lighting, as well as casting preferences, will be run through the sieve of multiple points of view and aesthetic perspectives – all in the service making your play as structurally solid and emotionally affecting as possible.
***
SPQR Stage Company is soliciting 10 minute plays for its 6th Annual New Work Weekend, occurring President's Day Weekend in February, at studio stage in Somers Point, New Jersey.
***
Utah Shakespeare Festival: Words Cubed
For Words Cubed, we are not looking for the ‘best’ play submitted, rather a good one that will benefit from, and fit into, our process. Also, how the plays complement one another – we select two for Words Cubed – and complement the season in which they are workshopped is part of our selection process. Additionally, a play that is very similar in theme or plot to recent Words Cubed selections are less likely to be chosen.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** ANGELA LANSBURY ON STAGE ***
Born in London, Dame Angela later moved to New York and attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Art.
She was noticed by a Hollywood executive at a party in 1942, and given her first role as a maid in the 1944 film Gaslight, based on the 1938 play of the same name. Her portrayal earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress the following year.
The term "gaslighting" originated from Patrick Hamilton's play, which was about a young woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing she is going crazy.
The British star went on to land two more Oscar nominations as Sibyl in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1945 and Laurence Harvey's manipulative mother in The Manchurian Candidate - opposite Frank Sinatra - in 1962.
After a move on to Broadway in the 1960s she won several Tony Awards, including one for her turn as Nellie Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical play Sweeney Todd.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63221326
***
If "Anyone Can Whistle" didn't know it was in difficulties, it should have listened to itself. It starts virtually in full cry and keeps shouting at the top of its voice most of the evening.
The performers yell rather than talk and run rather than walk. This insistence on high pressure cannot cover up the sloppiness of the book and the lack of laughter in the lines. It works best when there is dancing.
Angela Lansbury as the Mayoress appears with four volatile, tapdancing pages, and there is promise of life in the decrepit town. But Miss Lansbury doesn't get around to waking the town and the show until the third act. Know how she does it then? With a soft-shoe routine, accompanied by the pages, and by a series of high kicks.
The dancing is the cream of "Anyone Can Whistle." In the second act there is a dreamlike and nightmarish ballet full of angular, fluid and diverting designs. In the third, a chase to round up the cookies for the cookie jar takes the form of inventive whirlwind waltzes.
In one of them, a ballerina, helped by three male dancers, waltzes up the proscenium wall. With Bert Lahr's shinnying up the side of the stage in "Foxy," this will go down in history as the season for wall-climbing.
More...
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/19/specials/sondheim-whistle.html?scp=1&sq=Anyone%252520Can%252520Whistle&st=cse
***
Once Angela Lansbury opened in the original production, no one else has ever brought it back to Broadway (except for Lansbury herself in a brief stint in 1983, in a revival that was cut short after just 41 performances due to poor box office). But back in 1966, Lansbury was pushed to the forefront of leading women for musicals (making the cover of LIFE Magazine as well) and Mame would lead to the first of her five Tony Awards. But she was nobody’s first choice for the role except for one person: Jerry Herman. The story of how it all fell into place is a fascinating one, which I’ve pieced together from various sources for the purposes of this column.
Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame, first found success as a novel published in 1954. In 1957, it was made into a Broadway play adapted by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee (Inherit the Wind) and starred Rosalind Russell. A sensation in the part, she received a Tony Award nomination as well as a 1958 Academy Award nomination for the film version. Russell was the first one offered to do the musical but turned it down stating “Who wants to eat yesterday’s stew?” Then Mary Martin was seriously considered, as the musical’s original director Josh Logan, having directed her in the original production of South Pacific, adored her. When she turned it down, the list expanded to just about everyone who was anyone, but one thing was clear: Logan did NOT want Angela Lansbury. “He just didn’t think I was up to it,” the actress recalled years later in a television interview with Robert Osborne.
More...
https://ronfassler.medium.com/how-angela-became-mame-8d4cd52a9567
***
Angela Lansbury will head the cast of Edward Albee's “Counting the Ways” and “Listening” when the double bill is given its American stage premiere at the Hartford Stage Company on Jan. 28. Joining Miss Lansbury for the engagement at the Connecticut playhouse will be William Prince and Maureen Anderman.
Mr. Albee, who won praise for staging a revival of his “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Broadway last season. will direct the double bill. Both plays concern “the breakdown of communication in society and among individuals.” “Listening” is described as “a chamber piece, musical in form, with recurring themes and arias.”
In contrast, “Counting the Ways” comprises a series of blackouts in vaudeville manner, involving a husband and wife. It was recently given its world premiere by Britain's National Theater, with Beryl Reid in the role Miss Lansbury will play here.
Miss Lansbury's professional association with Mr. Albee dates to the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1972 of “All Over,” in which she acted with Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/28/archives/angela-lansbury-will-head-cast-of-albees-double-bill-in-hartford.html
***
Angela Lansbury On Playing Mrs. Lovett
Angela Lansbury is an actress who is currently starring in the tour of "Sweeney Todd," playing now in Philadelphia. "Sweeney Todd" is a musical with music by Stephen Sondheim based on the legend of "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," a barber whose quest for revenge leads to murder. Lansbury stars as his accomplice, and won a Tony for the role. She joins the show to discuss the musical and working with Sondheim, singing, and acting.
More...
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/angela-lansbury-playing-mrs-lovett
***
Lansbury is on flamboyant fine form, bypassing the celebrity-idolising applause that greets her every entrance and exit. Reprising her 2009 Tony Award-winning performance, Lansbury eagerly chatters and snuffs for ectoplasm like a reincarnation of Richard Briers crossed with a Pekinese. Then she launches into a mystical, cod-Egyptian dance, resembling a tiptoeing burglar attacked by wasps. Batty fun.
More...
https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/blithe-spirit-gielgud-theatre
***
Don’t forget a third of Lansbury’s genius was left on the stage, so do yourself a favor and fall into a YouTube spiral of the highest order. Her Mame curtain call is absolutely spectacular, a throwback to a time when standing ovations meant something; the applause from (allegedly) the raucous first performance of “A Little Priest” on Sweeney Todd’s opening night is thunderous; and existing footage from her Tony-winning turn in Gypsy is a masterclass in her genius blend of vaudeville-era showbiz and mid-century psychology.
More...
https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/an-angela-lansbury-streaming-guide.html
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Szeged Contemporary Dance Company presents: Carmina Burana
Making their first trip across the Atlantic, Szeged Contemporary Dance Company / Szegedi Kortárs Balett (SCDC), Hungary’s leading contemporary dance company, will make their U.S. debut. Presented in partnership with Liszt Institute, New York’s Hungarian Cultural Center, SCDC will bring their highly acclaimed adaptation of Carmina Burana to the U.S. The work has been performed 350 times, with more than 180,000 viewers worldwide, sold out audiences, and standing ovations across Europe, Mexico and the Middle East.
Carl Orff’s monumental musical masterpiece is brought to life as a spectacular dance-theater adaptation. Carmina Burana vividly captures the common fears and joys of an imaginary barbarian community as it keeps fighting for its own survival and humanity through mysterious rituals until its very last breath. Fate sometimes brings love, joy, and sometimes brings sadness or death. A girl whose life was meant to be short can feel true happiness for a moment, when love makes her forget all the bad things, and makes her believe in a life that can be different, that can be better. But Fortune is fickle and cruel.
EVENT DETAILS:
November 5-6 2022 at The Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater - 405 West 55th St. at 9th Avenue. Saturday at 7:00 PM, Sunday at 7:00 PM
HEALTH AND SAFETY:
For this event, all guests will be required to wear a face covering at all times in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
PLEASE NOTE
RSVP priority will be held until 10 mins to showtime, at which time we will release all seats to walk up guests.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/szeged-contemporary-dance-company-presents-carmina-burana-tickets-441927816997?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
*** PRIMARY STAGES ***
ONLINE CLASSES STARTING NEXT WEEK: First Draft and Kinetic Energy Workshop Online at Primary Stages ESPA!
Start a First Draft or jumpstart your creativity with our Kinetic Energy Workshop. Faculty includes CRYSTAL SKILLMAN (Writer, King Kirby, Rain and Zoe Save the World), WINTER MILLER (Writer, In Darfur at The Public Theater, No One Is Forgotten at Rattlestick), and many other award-winning writers who provide practical skills and expert guidance in a collaborative atmosphere.
Flexible, artist-friendly payment plans available.
http://primarystages.org/espa/writing
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Fleas on the Dog seeks submissions for Issue 13 to be published January 2023.
For the Playwrights: All of the plays you’ll find in each issue of Fleas On The Dog are considered primarily as pieces of dramatic literature, living their lives, for the moment, strictly on the page. Some pieces are more or less finished, some will probably see additional revision but everyone involved the making theatre – especially playwrights and directors - know that a script is only the pretext for an embodied life on stage or film. And as theatre-making is a collective effort, scripts in production often go through a long revision process informed by directors, actors, technical theatre specialists, et al. Every bit of dialogue you’ve written, every cue, pause or note on stage logistics, and the minute details of your take on sets and lighting, as well as casting preferences, will be run through the sieve of multiple points of view and aesthetic perspectives – all in the service making your play as structurally solid and emotionally affecting as possible.
***
SPQR Stage Company is soliciting 10 minute plays for its 6th Annual New Work Weekend, occurring President's Day Weekend in February, at studio stage in Somers Point, New Jersey.
***
Utah Shakespeare Festival: Words Cubed
For Words Cubed, we are not looking for the ‘best’ play submitted, rather a good one that will benefit from, and fit into, our process. Also, how the plays complement one another – we select two for Words Cubed – and complement the season in which they are workshopped is part of our selection process. Additionally, a play that is very similar in theme or plot to recent Words Cubed selections are less likely to be chosen.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** ANGELA LANSBURY ON STAGE ***
Born in London, Dame Angela later moved to New York and attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Art.
She was noticed by a Hollywood executive at a party in 1942, and given her first role as a maid in the 1944 film Gaslight, based on the 1938 play of the same name. Her portrayal earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress the following year.
The term "gaslighting" originated from Patrick Hamilton's play, which was about a young woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing she is going crazy.
The British star went on to land two more Oscar nominations as Sibyl in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1945 and Laurence Harvey's manipulative mother in The Manchurian Candidate - opposite Frank Sinatra - in 1962.
After a move on to Broadway in the 1960s she won several Tony Awards, including one for her turn as Nellie Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical play Sweeney Todd.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63221326
***
If "Anyone Can Whistle" didn't know it was in difficulties, it should have listened to itself. It starts virtually in full cry and keeps shouting at the top of its voice most of the evening.
The performers yell rather than talk and run rather than walk. This insistence on high pressure cannot cover up the sloppiness of the book and the lack of laughter in the lines. It works best when there is dancing.
Angela Lansbury as the Mayoress appears with four volatile, tapdancing pages, and there is promise of life in the decrepit town. But Miss Lansbury doesn't get around to waking the town and the show until the third act. Know how she does it then? With a soft-shoe routine, accompanied by the pages, and by a series of high kicks.
The dancing is the cream of "Anyone Can Whistle." In the second act there is a dreamlike and nightmarish ballet full of angular, fluid and diverting designs. In the third, a chase to round up the cookies for the cookie jar takes the form of inventive whirlwind waltzes.
In one of them, a ballerina, helped by three male dancers, waltzes up the proscenium wall. With Bert Lahr's shinnying up the side of the stage in "Foxy," this will go down in history as the season for wall-climbing.
More...
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/19/specials/sondheim-whistle.html?scp=1&sq=Anyone%252520Can%252520Whistle&st=cse
***
Once Angela Lansbury opened in the original production, no one else has ever brought it back to Broadway (except for Lansbury herself in a brief stint in 1983, in a revival that was cut short after just 41 performances due to poor box office). But back in 1966, Lansbury was pushed to the forefront of leading women for musicals (making the cover of LIFE Magazine as well) and Mame would lead to the first of her five Tony Awards. But she was nobody’s first choice for the role except for one person: Jerry Herman. The story of how it all fell into place is a fascinating one, which I’ve pieced together from various sources for the purposes of this column.
Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame, first found success as a novel published in 1954. In 1957, it was made into a Broadway play adapted by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee (Inherit the Wind) and starred Rosalind Russell. A sensation in the part, she received a Tony Award nomination as well as a 1958 Academy Award nomination for the film version. Russell was the first one offered to do the musical but turned it down stating “Who wants to eat yesterday’s stew?” Then Mary Martin was seriously considered, as the musical’s original director Josh Logan, having directed her in the original production of South Pacific, adored her. When she turned it down, the list expanded to just about everyone who was anyone, but one thing was clear: Logan did NOT want Angela Lansbury. “He just didn’t think I was up to it,” the actress recalled years later in a television interview with Robert Osborne.
More...
https://ronfassler.medium.com/how-angela-became-mame-8d4cd52a9567
***
Angela Lansbury will head the cast of Edward Albee's “Counting the Ways” and “Listening” when the double bill is given its American stage premiere at the Hartford Stage Company on Jan. 28. Joining Miss Lansbury for the engagement at the Connecticut playhouse will be William Prince and Maureen Anderman.
Mr. Albee, who won praise for staging a revival of his “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on Broadway last season. will direct the double bill. Both plays concern “the breakdown of communication in society and among individuals.” “Listening” is described as “a chamber piece, musical in form, with recurring themes and arias.”
In contrast, “Counting the Ways” comprises a series of blackouts in vaudeville manner, involving a husband and wife. It was recently given its world premiere by Britain's National Theater, with Beryl Reid in the role Miss Lansbury will play here.
Miss Lansbury's professional association with Mr. Albee dates to the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1972 of “All Over,” in which she acted with Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/28/archives/angela-lansbury-will-head-cast-of-albees-double-bill-in-hartford.html
***
Angela Lansbury On Playing Mrs. Lovett
Angela Lansbury is an actress who is currently starring in the tour of "Sweeney Todd," playing now in Philadelphia. "Sweeney Todd" is a musical with music by Stephen Sondheim based on the legend of "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," a barber whose quest for revenge leads to murder. Lansbury stars as his accomplice, and won a Tony for the role. She joins the show to discuss the musical and working with Sondheim, singing, and acting.
More...
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/angela-lansbury-playing-mrs-lovett
***
Lansbury is on flamboyant fine form, bypassing the celebrity-idolising applause that greets her every entrance and exit. Reprising her 2009 Tony Award-winning performance, Lansbury eagerly chatters and snuffs for ectoplasm like a reincarnation of Richard Briers crossed with a Pekinese. Then she launches into a mystical, cod-Egyptian dance, resembling a tiptoeing burglar attacked by wasps. Batty fun.
More...
https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/blithe-spirit-gielgud-theatre
***
Don’t forget a third of Lansbury’s genius was left on the stage, so do yourself a favor and fall into a YouTube spiral of the highest order. Her Mame curtain call is absolutely spectacular, a throwback to a time when standing ovations meant something; the applause from (allegedly) the raucous first performance of “A Little Priest” on Sweeney Todd’s opening night is thunderous; and existing footage from her Tony-winning turn in Gypsy is a masterclass in her genius blend of vaudeville-era showbiz and mid-century psychology.
More...
https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/an-angela-lansbury-streaming-guide.html
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