Monthly Archives: September 2019

STATEMENT REGARDING THE PASSING OF INTERNATIONAL OPERA STAR JESSYE NORMAN · Sep 30th

(via Gwendolyn Quinn)

(New York, NY — September 30, 2019) — It is with deep sadness and sorrow that we announce the passing of international opera star Jessye Norman, in a statement issued by Norman’s family through the family’s spokesperson, Gwendolyn Quinn.

Norman, 74 years old, passed away today, Monday, September 30, 2019, at 7:54 a.m. ET at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, NY, where she was surrounded by loved ones. The official cause of death was septic shock and multi-organ failure secondary to complications of a spinal cord injury she had sustained in 2015.

Norman was the eldest of two remaining siblings, James Norman and Elaine Sturkey, from a total of five children. “We are so proud of Jessye’s musical achievements and the inspiration that she provided to audiences around the world that will continue to be a source of joy. We are equally proud of her humanitarian endeavors addressing matters such as hunger, homelessness, youth development, and arts and culture education.”

Funeral arrangements will be announced in the coming days.

PLÁCIDO DOMINGO LEAVES MET OPERA AMID SEXUAL HARASSMENT INQUIRY · Sep 30th

(Michael Cooper’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/24; via Pam Green.)

The star singer, accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, dropped out of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and indicated he would not return to the Met.

In an 11th-hour reversal, the superstar singer Plácido Domingo withdrew on Tuesday from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and indicated he would not return to the Met, amid rising tensions over the company’s response to allegations that he had sexually harassed multiple women.

Mr. Domingo’s withdrawal on the eve of the performance — opening night is Wednesday — came as a growing number of people who work at the Met expressed concern about his upcoming performances. Other American cultural institutions, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Opera, had already canceled Mr. Domingo’s upcoming appearances, citing the need to provide a safe workplace.

The backstage unease at the Met boiled over in recent days, including at a heated, sometimes emotional meeting that Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, held with orchestra and chorus members after the “Macbeth” dress rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. Some of those at the meeting questioned what Mr. Domingo’s return said about the Met’s commitment to protecting women and rooting out sexual harassment.

(Read more)

Photo: The New York Times

IN PRAISE OF TOVE DITLEVSEN — THE GREATEST DANISH WRITER YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF · Sep 30th

(Boyd Tonkin’s article appeared in the Spectator, 9/26.)

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen reviewed

Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her own life aged 58, and you may have one or two prior expectations. They will probably not include a flirtatious dinner with an enthralled Evelyn Waugh (‘so attentive and kind’) in a Copenhagen restaurant so quiet that ‘we could hear the thumping of ships’ motors far out on the water’. Tove Ditlevsen and the ‘vibrant, youthful’ Waugh have their evening spoiled when her third husband — a crazy, drug-pushing medic — turns up in his motorcycle leathers to drag Tove away for her bedtime injection, plus a bout of rougher than usual sex that leaves her spaced-out, ‘limp and blissful’.

The author of Vile Bodies himself might have composed this scene from the late 1940s, when Ditlevsen (born 1917) had already published several acclaimed volumes of poetry and fiction. Both fêted as a literary prodigy in Denmark and derided as a circus freak, the slum-girl superstar had become hopelessly addicted to pethidine and methadone. For all her celebrity, she felt for years that ‘no price was too high to be able to keep away intolerable real life.’

Wrenching sadness and pitch-dark comedy regularly partner her swift progress from a cramped Copenhagen tenement to literary fame. Ditlevsen published these three compact memoirs between 1967 and 1971. They capture the naivety, terror and rapture of her early life across a fast-changing palette of prose colors. The tones darken from her quizzical interrogation of adult follies in Childhood through the satirical larkiness of Youth to the junkie melo-drama of Dependency. Tiina Nunnally’s graceful, witty English versions of the first two volumes date from the mid 1980s; Michael Favala Goldman has now translated the more sombre and introspective third.

Little Tove feels herself ‘a foreigner in this world’, a gangly oddball accidentally dropped with her gruff socialist dad (a stoker, often unemployed), her inscrutable maidservant mother, ‘full of secret thoughts I would never know’, and cheerfully hapless brother Edvin. With her penniless family barely surviving the interwar decades on the fringe of the Copenhagen working class, Tove must hope for nothing better than marriage to a ‘stable skilled worker’ who doesn’t booze too much. Instead, she reads and writes, thinks and observes, gathering enamel-bright memories of childhood into a ‘library of the soul’ she will browse over a creative lifetime.

(Read more)

Photo: The Spectator

THE EXTRAORDINARY GENIUS OF DONAL MCCANN ON STAGE · Sep 28th

(Derek O’Connor’s article appeared in The Irish Times, 9/23.)

Derek O’Connor remembers the actor, who was a giant of Irish theatre

I never saw Diego Maradona play football. I never saw Nijinsky dance. And I never saw Miles Davis play the horn.

But baby, I saw Donal McCann act.

So, you know what? Fundamentally, I’m good.

I’m not quite sure that they make actors like Donal McCann any more. I’m not quite sure that they ever did. Twenty years after his passing, McCann is far from forgotten. Talk to anyone with a passing knowledge of Irish theatre, and chances are that they’ll acknowledge him as a giant, one of the greats, a master of the form.

But then talk to someone who witnessed him ply his trade – scratch that, his vocation – and the tone changes to one of reverence, of something resembling awe, a single question left unspoken . . . How did he do that?

I came to the party late. The first time I saw McCann onstage was in a Gate Theatre production of Juno And The Paycock, playing Seán O’Casey’s poetic wastrel Captain Boyle. Little more than a decade later, he would be dead at the ridiculously early age of 56, from pancreatic cancer. I didn’t see him on purpose, either – I was on a school trip. Juno was (as it remains now) on the Leaving Certificate curriculum. An enthusiastic English teacher – one Declan Fitzpatrick – insisted we experienced the work onstage.

Captain Boyle is one of the great archetypes, in that the character so exquisitely personifies a particular strain of Irish male, as prevalent now as ever. With a pitch-perfect wingman in the shape of John Kavanagh’s wired and wiry Joxer Daly, McCann’s Boyle was both pantomime turn and Falstaffian tragedy, sometimes within the same scene, sometimes within the same sentence. I had never – and have never since – seen anyone so utterly alive on the stage. How did he do that?

(Read more)

Photo: The Irish Times

‘FOR COLORED GIRLS’ RETURNS, AS A CELEBRATION AND AS A WEAPON · Sep 27th

(Laura Collins-Hughes’s article appeared in The New York Times, 9/13; via Pam Green.)  

Ntozake Shange’s play, with its unflinching depiction of black women’s experience, is coming back to the Public Theater more than 40 years after opening there.

It doesn’t matter how famous a play you’ve written, or how deeply embedded in the culture it’s become. If you’re a playwright, you’re always going to be nudging someone about putting that show onstage again.

So the last time they spoke, about a week before she died, the playwright and poet Ntozake Shange had a question for her director, Leah C. Gardiner.

“By the way,” she asked, “is there any movement on the production?”

She meant the Public Theater’s revival of her breakthrough work, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which starts previews on Oct. 8. Shange, who died last October at 70, envisioned the production as a celebration. It’s also a homecoming of sorts, at the theater where this enduringly influential choreopoem opened to acclaim in 1976.

(Read more)

Photo: The New York Times

 

CONSTANT STANISLAVSKI (35) · Sep 26th

“If we could only see the image, see how he walks, talks, laughs, and come to know the quality of his voice,” we said to ourselves when we approached the role.  “If we can find the image, all the rest will come of itself.”

“What do you feel?  The physically outward image or the fundamental spiritual feeling of the role?  The idea for the sake of which the poet wrote the play?” (MLIA)

TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY INTERVIEWS PETER BROOK–THIS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, FOLLOWING PERFORMANCE OF WHY? AT POLONSKY SHAKESPEARE CENTER, HOME OF THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE · Sep 25th

Part of Citywide Recognition Peter Brook/NY, This Free Event Will Be Captured by Partner Organization WNET/ALL ARTS for Future Broadcast

Thursday, September 26 at approximately 8:45pm
Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn)
Free and open to the public

Peter Brook/NY (Karen Brooks Hopkins, Executive Producer) today announces that Tarell Alvin McCraney will interview Peter Brook following the Thursday, September 26, performance of Why?, written and directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne; featuring Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni; and presented by Theatre for a New Audience. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be filmed by partner organization WNET/ALL ARTS for future broadcast. For complete Peter Brook/NY programming information, please visit tfana.org/pbny. Download images here.

About the Artists

Tarell Alvin McCraney is an acclaimed writer. His script In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue is the basis for the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins, for which McCraney and Jenkins won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He wrote the film High Flying Bird which premiered on Netflix directed by Steven Soderbergh. McCraney’s plays include Ms. Blakk for President (co-written with Tina Landau), The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy, Head of Passes, Wig Out!, and Choir Boy which was nominated for four Tony Awards. McCraney is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, the Whiting Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, the Evening Standard Award, the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Windham Campbell Award, and a USA Artist Award. He is currently Chair of Playwriting at Yale School of Drama; an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theatre Chicago; and a member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects. McCraney is currently working on an original scripted TV series, David Makes Man, for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network, produced by Michael B. Jordan and Page Fright Productions.

Peter Brook was born in London in 1925. Throughout his career, he distinguished himself in various genres: theatre, opera, cinema and writing. He directed his first play there in 1943. He then went on to direct over 70 productions in London, Paris, and New York. In 1971, he founded the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris with Micheline Rozan, and in 1974, opened its permanent base in the Bouffes du Nord Theatre. Most recently, he has directed The Suit (2012), The Valley of Astonishment (2014), Battlefield (2015), and The Prisoner (2018).

About Peter Brook/NY

A consortium of New York City cultural, educational, and media institutions come together to create Peter Brook/NY (Karen Brooks Hopkins, Executive Producer), a citywide recognition of Brook’s work and his collaborations with Marie-Hélène Estienne from 1953 to the present. In addition to the U.S. Premiere of Brook and Estienne’s Why? which Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) presents September 21 – October 6 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Peter Brook/NY features programing from BAM, The Center for Fiction, Columbia University, French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival, Hunter College, The Juilliard School, TFANA, and WNET.  A booklet produced by BAM Hamm Archives—featuring historic photographs, a timeline of Brook’s productions and New York presence, an essay by writer Violaine Huisman, and information about Peter Brook/NY events—will be available to all attendees and online at BAM.org and TFANA.org.

Leadership support for Peter Brook/NY is provided by The JKW Foundation in honor of Jean Stein and The Lostand Foundation. Additional support is provided by Paul and Caroline Cronson/Evelyn Sharp Foundation, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, and John Lichtenstein.

About Why? (U.S. Premiere)

Written and Directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne
Featuring Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni 
Presented by Theatre for a New Audience
September 21-October 6, 2019 (opening September 26)
Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn)
Tickets, starting at $20, at www.tfana.org, 866.811.4111, and the Polonsky Shakespeare Center box office

At the beginning of the 20th Century “why” and “how to do theatre” became burning questions. What was theatre about? How could it be more alive, more open to all? How could the actor be helped to be truer? What could be a new space? A new way of acting? These questions and many others take us on an exploration joyful and dramatic. This is “why” we do Why?

“Theatre is a very dangerous weapon.” These words were written in the 1920s by one of the most creative, most innovative, directors the theatre has known. His name is Vsevolod Meyerhold. He saw all the menacing dangers that the theatre and art in general were going through in the 1930s in Russia. He read “the writing on the wall”, as we call it, but he did not stop. He hoped until the last minute that the Russian Revolution would win. Meyerhold paid for this with his life.

The three actors—Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni—will unfold for us this very human story. 
—Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, Paris 2019

Why? received its world premiere at C.I.C.T/Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, France on June 19, 2019. The project was co-commissioned by C.I.C.T./Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord; Theatre for a New Audience; Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw, National Performing Arts Center; Taiwan R.O.C. – National Taichung Theater; Centro Dramatico Nacional, Madrid; Teatro Dimitri, Verscio; Théâtre Firmin Gémier, La Piscine.

Support for the production of Why? is provided by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the French Institute Alliance Française, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and many generous donors to Theatre for a New Audience. 

The production is part of the Crossing the Line Festival organized by the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), as well as Brooklyn Falls for France, a cultural season organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and FACE Foundation in partnership with Brooklyn venues. 

McCraney Photo: Etonline.com

Via Adriana Leshko

 

CONSTANT STANISLAVSKI (34) · Sep 25th

In order to rejuvenate art, we declared war on all the conventionalities of the theatre wherever they might occur—in the acting, in the properties, in the scenery, the costumes, the interpretation of the play, the curtain, or anywhere else in the play or the theatre.  All that was new and that violated the usual customs of the theatre seemed beautiful and useful to us.  (MLIA)