(from the Associated Press, 8/8; via the Wall Street Journal.)
NEW YORK — Barbara Cook, whose shimmering soprano made her one of Broadway’s leading ingenues and later a major cabaret and concert interpreter of popular American song, has died. She was 89.
Cook died early Tuesday of respiratory failure at her home in Manhattan, surrounded by family and friends, according to publicist Amanda Kaus. Her last meal was vanilla ice cream.
Throughout her nearly six decades on stage, Cook’s voice remained remarkably supple, gaining in emotional honesty and expanding on its natural ability to go straight to the heart.
Arthur Miller would have been 100 years old on October 17th this year. To mark the centenary BBC Radio 4, LA Theatre Works, and a stellar American cast have come together to produce four new dramas by MikeWalker and Jonathan Holloway.
As a writer Miller felt that to create a character, you had to understand how family, circumstances and events had shaped that character. ‘The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish’, as he famously put it. These specially commissioned plays recreate some of the experiences that shaped Miller himself, throwing light on how he would become one of the most influential playwrights in American literature.
Beginnings Arthur Miller is born in New York on the 17th of October 1915 to a prosperous family in the clothing business. A poor school student, he loves making things with wood and dreams of becoming a crooner. But when the stock market crashes and the Millers face ruin, Arthur contemplates a different future. By Mike Walker.
Producer for LA Theatre Works: Susan Loewenberg Associate Producers: Anna Lyse Erikson and Myke D Wysekopf Sound by Mark Holden, Wes Dewberry, and Catherine Robinson
A BBC/Cymru Wales and LA Theatre Works Co-Production, directed by Kate McAll
LA Theatre Works is a non-profit audio drama company based in Los Angeles that records classic and contemporary plays. They have been collaborating with the BBC for nearly 30 years, beginning with a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that starred Richard Dreyfuss and Stacey Keach.
(Isaac Butler’s and Dan Kois’s article appeared in Slate, 7/25; via Pam Green.)
Here’s how I discovered Sam Shepard:
In the ’90s, back before Giuliani and co. broken-windowed the last vestiges of seediness from Times Square, the Drama Book Shop lived above some kind of adult emporium. I was there, looking for plays. The highest honor in my high school was directing a one-act your senior year. It was the brass ring, and even though I was only in eighth grade, I was planning how I would clutch it.
This was my first ever visit to the Drama Book Shop, but it would become an annual pilgrimage, largely due to the moment when, after asking the clerk for some good one-acts, I was first told about Sam Shepard. A minute or two later, he had placed Fool for Love and Other Plays in my hands, and he was evangelizing about the bizarre virtues of a play called Suicide in B Flat. I remember thinking: Who is this gorgeous man on the cover, and how did he come up with a title like that?
I read Suicide in B Flat, entering Shepard’s be-bop nightmare in which a jazz musician may have killed himself, or may have committed murder. I didn’t get it, but I was beguiled by it. I immediately tore into Fool for Love, which opens with maybe the greatest stage direction of all time: “This play is to be performed relentlessly, without a break.”
He wrote without the brakes on, or perhaps he cut them.
Relentlessly and without a break is a pretty good way of describing both the feeling of Shepard’s work and his prolific genius itself. From 1964 to 2014, Shepard wrote more than 40 plays and 10 films. He wrote without the brakes on, or perhaps he cut them. The myth of Shepard has always been in part fueled by his writing some of his early plays under the influence and never revising them. But as his career went on, he became a meticulous craftsman of language, even while always experimenting with structure. He pursued the limits of the form, the limits of language, the limits of what the word could do on stage, and then he pushed these limits ever further out, creating an expanded imaginative space that the rest of us are lucky to be able to play in.
Listen at: