Category: Arts

  • Miss Saigon at Hawai'i's Army Community Theatre (Plus Revisionism)

    While in Hawai’i, I read this review of Miss Saigon – the first local production of the musical in Hawai’i: An expendable Asian woman’s timely suicide gets an American Vietnam vet and his wife out of an awkward situation — that is the apparently intended, albeit unconventional, subtext of Army Community Theatre’s otherwise enjoyable “Miss […]

  • Rudolf the Red-Hosed Reindeer

    I love Matt Gunnels, Chris Carpenter and Brigitte Ditmars. I went to school with them and I’ve seen them in plays (or directed them or acted next to them) for over a decade. And I never tire of seeing them onstage. And that is why seeing them in Hell in a Handbag’s Rudolf the Red-Hosed […]

  • Celia Calle

    http://celiacalle.com/ (via Metafilter)

  • King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare Edition)

    What a combo – stationary bike and King Lear. I love this edition, too. I always felt like I wasn’t in on the whole Shakespeare cult in college – classmates would read some swatch of King John and we were all supposed to sigh and sip from our water bottles and marvel at the beauty […]

  • ATTN: Directors and Choreographers

    There are few things that can throw me into a blind rage like shitty staging. Earlier in the week I’d read the Chicago Reader‘s picks which included the Dance Chicago festival featuring a piece performed by a man with no legs. He’d lost his legs in a manufacturing accident when he was 19 and happened […]

  • Memorizing Lear

    I’ve got a strange winter project I’m thinking of. I think I might try to memorize a Shakespearean tragedy. It sounds like a fun mental challenge. I’ve memorized hours of dialogue before but think memorizing directly from the original First Folio facsimile would be a great little puzzle. I was going to start with Lear […]

  • UK Gallery Bans Air Kissing

    Thank God, someone is putting an end to all this goddamned air kissing. I think it’s so faux-nouveau when people air kiss me. Even worse is when someone is presumptuous and kisses you on the lips. Acquaintances cannot kiss me on the lips. Friends and family and of course Ron, fine. That was the one […]

  • Reality Jamming

    Improv Everywhere took over their local Starbucks. They repeated the same set of events and interactions repeatedly for over an hour. I love this! Bystander: Here it comes, here it comes! Actress: (rushing out): I can’t believe you’re doing this. Actor: Come back … come back! Katie! (exits) Bystander: See, I told you! “Come back, […]

  • Back to Thebes

    My adaptation of Antigone is going to be produced in Ohio this coming fall! This was my thesis and project – sort of what would happen if Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick did a Greek tragedy. I read it now and see a lot of me intuiting things that I sensed were happening in the […]

  • Inappropriate Cabaret

    Brigitte told a yarn about going to see Elaine Stritch and she’s commenting on cabaret singers singing songs that are way too old for them. Elaine: I don’t get it with women in their mid-30s singing ‘I’m Still Here.’ Where have you been? This led to a riff on other inappropriate songs suchs as an […]