Lost in the 21st Century

April 24, 2011 · 11:50 pm

“Steel Magnolias” at Triad Stage

I just came in from seeing “Steel Magnolias” at Triad Stage here in Greensboro. And it was good.

I know Triad Stage and other Regional Theatres need to do crowd pleasers like “Steel Magnolias”. They bring in a large audience, that will hopefully come back again for other shows and help to build an audience for live theatre. Shows like this also bring in a lot of cash. But they also create an interesting experience for Season Ticket holders, like me, who would not have gone to see “Steel Magnolias” if it were not part of the Season. It gives us the chance revisit plays from our pasts. And sometimes these new visits surprise us.

As usual, at Triad Stage, the production values were wonderful and the acting was excellent- all that we expect from Triad Stage.

The problem, for me, was the play.

I’ve probably seen “Steel Magnolias” too many times, both on stage and film, but it has been several years since I’ve seen it. I’ve probably also heard the lines too many times, but in this production, there did seem to be some laugh lines that were missed.

And you know what? It just wasn’t as good a play as I remembered from seeing it years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of heart in this show, some memorable characters and some funny lines. You can’t help but be drawn into the lives of and care about these upper middle class Louisiana women. But don’t look too closely at the play itself. The first scene, in particular, goes on way too long…

I was also surprised at how rooted “Steel Magnolias” was in the 1980’s and how dated it seemed now. Times have changed so much more than I realized since the times in which this play was set. I’m not sure the cultural references make sense to anyone under 40, but then that’s not “Steel Magnolias” audience.

And it was almost a full house on Easter Sunday.

If you love “Steel Magnolias”, go see this production. Especially if you’ve never seen it on stage and only know it from the movie. You won’t see a better production with so many fine actresses around here any time soon. It’s definitely a pleasant evening in the theatre and it received a standing ovation at the end of tonight’s show.

Just don’t be too surprised, either, if the magic just isn’t there. It’s not that they don’t try and succeed, on so many levels, at Triad Stage. It’s just that the play itself isn’t as good as I remembered it being all those years ago…

And that might be the adjustment that I’m struggling with…

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Tagged as broadway, Greensboro, North Carolina, Regional Theatre, Theater, theatre, Triad Stage

April 24, 2011 · 11:14 pm

Happy Birthday, Barbra Streisand and Shirley MacLaine

Two icons were born today: Barbra Streisand is 69 and Virginia’s own Shirley MacLaine is 77….

Of course, I have to put up a couple of clips:

A little prime Streisand:

And a little MacLaine:

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Filed under Broadway, Entertainment, Gay, Movies

Tagged as broadway, entertainment, gay, hollywood, movies, Music, Musical Theatre, Musicals, television

April 24, 2011 · 10:51 pm

The Problem With Gay Men Today : Salon.com Talks to Larry Kramer

Very interesting interview with Larry Kramer about the differences between the generations of Gay Men….

Hard as it is to believe, this generation really grew up in a different, safer, more accepting time …

Those of us who are older had a very different experience- and they have no idea what it was like during the AIDS Crisis or growing up when it was still, as Lord Alfred Douglas said, “The love that dare not speak its name”.

And Gay Men, like most Americans, don’t really care about or want to know their history….

Larry Kramer’s ground breaking play from the outbreak of the AIDS crisis opens on Broadway this week….

From Salon.com interview with Thomas Rogers:

Rogers: I saw a preview of the play last night with a friend. I think many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men.

Kramer: Like what?

Rogers: Like the idea of promiscuity as a political statement and that it would be treasonous or controversial for gay men to tell other gay men not to have sex, or to have sex with a condom. What do you think young people should take away from the play?

Kramer: It’s our history. We’re gay. This was part of our history. This was the most horrible thing the gay population ever lived through. And yet it also represented — later on, with ACT UP, and the getting of AIDS drugs — the most spectacular achievement the gay population ever had. We gays did that.

I don’t know why so many gay men don’t want to know their history. I don’t know why they turned their back on the older generation as if they don’t want to have anything to do with them. I would like us to get beyond that.

Rogers: But do you really think that lack of interest in history is particular to this generation?

Kramer: You tell me.

Rogers: Well, I’m 27, and I know that my formative images of gay life had nothing to do with AIDS. Ellen came out of the closet when I was in junior high and “Will & Grace” made gayness seem like a consumer identity more than anything else. Gayness wasn’t really linked with sickness is my mind, and so those early AIDS battles, I think, seem very alien to a lot of young people’s experiences.

Kramer: I don’t know. I could understand what you’re saying. Sometimes when I go to schools, kids say that they’re taught to be non-confrontational or non-participatory now, almost like it’s not cool to have opinions and express them, which is sad. I hope we’re coming out of all that.

MORE: The problem with gay men today – Interviews – Salon.com.

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Tagged as broadway, gay, history, new york, theatre

April 24, 2011 · 11:13 am

Does anyone want to be “well-read?” – Roger Ebert’s Journal

Another great article on Reading and Readers from Roger Ebert…

It’s especially sad that, given digital books and the physical accessibility of “books” in so many formats today, that more people aren’t reading these authors.

I read a lot and I’m going to make a commitment to myself to read some of these “old friends” so at least I can say I read them. And quote them….

“Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his “field”) is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados–or Trilling himself?”

I read through this list with dismay. I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five. Yet I know with a sinking feeling that Ozick asks the correct question. Who at this hour is reading them? Paul Goodman, whose books so deeply influenced and formed me? Edmund Wilson, a role model? James Farrell, whose naturalistic Studs Lonigan evoked a decade of Chicago life? Mailer, who boasted he had beaten all of his contemporaries?

How many of them have you read? Some, I suspect, but they belong to your past. Most of you will have read Ginsberg’s “Howl,” but how much more of his poetry? I have his collected poems on my shelf, but don’t care to take them down. Whitman’s poems, on the other hand, are at the side of my chair and I read one every morning. I have every one of Edmund Wilson’s books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Strauss & Giroux editions. Who cites him? Susan Sontag? Remembered for defining Camp.

via Does anyone want to be “well-read?” – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

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Tagged as Books, Literature, Reading, Writers, Writing

April 24, 2011 · 11:06 am

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything -NPR

Great article for we bibliophiles and other Culture Vultures from NPR:

The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.

via The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR.

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April 23, 2011 · 10:08 pm

Easter Parade: Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine

A great version of this song….

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Tagged as broadway, Easter, Films, Holidays, hollywood, Jazz, movies, Music, Musicals

April 23, 2011 · 9:48 pm

Donald Trump: The President We Deserve

God, I hope we don’t get what we deserve. That should be everyone’s fear…

Still, this is an illuminating article from Salon:

So it’s best to be prepared. I spent Tuesday speed-reading “TrumpNation,” in the hope that it would help me imagine what a Donald Trump presidency might be like. The experience has been illuminating. I’m a changed man, and I’m here to tell you, Donald Trump is everything Americans deserve as a president.

I didn’t expect to think this. I thought that a review of a business career marked by, to borrow O’Brien’s summation, “repeated failures, flirtations with personal bankruptcy, sequential corporate bankruptcies, [and] the squandering of billions of dollars” would provide grist for a thorough denunciation of the Donald. As the political analysts have been quick to point out, Trump’s career should be a gold mine for opposition researchers — and not just because of the multiplicity of political views he has expressed. Let’s not forget that in the early 1990s, the Trump brand meant failure. He had fatally overextended himself by wasting billions of dollars of borrowed money on a spending spree that included, among other things, casinos, airlines, ridiculously overpriced hotels, and luxury yachts unloaded by bankrupt Middle Eastern arms sellers.

He dumped his first wife for a younger trophy, and then dumped her for another trophy, shrugging off the tabloid chatter by telling a reporter “You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write when you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” He made a habit of buying property when the price was high, and then being forced to unload it at a huge loss when the real estate market crashed. He has proved comically inept as an Atlantic City casino owner — really, it’s one thing to imagine a gambling mogul in the White House, but an incompetent one? In the course of his career, he’s been bailed out by his father, by his siblings, and by the banks to whom he owed hundreds of millions of dollars. By any rational standpoint, his disasters are far more spectacular than his successes. He’s a reality-television star, for crying out loud!

More: Donald Trump: The president we deserve – How the World Works – Salon.com.

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Tagged as Congress, Donald Trump, Elections, GOP, politics, Republicans

April 23, 2011 · 9:38 pm

Judy Garland: Over the Rainbow, and Then Some!

In recognition of her Carnegie Hall Concert 50 years ago tonight, there’s a lot of new interest in Judy Garland.

Here is a great article from this month’s Vanity Fair:

In December 1959, Judy Garland, only 37 but with a quarter-century of hard living behind her, lay near death in New York’s Doctors Hospital. Alcohol and pills were the culprits. When in reasonably good health, Garland, who stood an inch under five feet, weighed 100 pounds. Now she weighed 180. Her tiny frame was grotesquely swollen with fluid and her liver severely compromised. Her eyes were glazed; her memory was failing; her body was shutting down. Walking by Garland’s hospital room, a close friend overheard a clutch of doctors discussing her condition. One of them turned to the friend. “I have to tell you the truth,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’s going to make it.”

She made it. “She had the constitution of an army,” Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft says. “She just knew she had to keep going.” But three weeks later, after 20 quarts of fluid had been drained from her body, her lead physician told Garland, “For the rest of your life, all your physical activity must be curtailed. You are a permanent semi-invalid.… It goes without saying that under no circumstances can you ever work again.”

Garland fell back onto her pillows. “Whoopee!” she cried, weakly.

More: Over the Rainbow, and Then Some! | Vanity Fair.