Thursday, November 17, 2011
Monday, October 4, 2010
Moby Dick: The Yiddish Version
from: Moby Dick: The Yiddish Version, Being the Story of a Nebbishy Mensch and a Groys Vays Gefilte Fish © 2010 Peter Basta Brightbill
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Go See David Michôd's film "Animal Kingdom"
For those who have not yet seen it, and who live in NYC or LA, run, do not walk, to go see David Michôd's "Animal Kingdom" from Australia. Set in Melbourne in the 1980's, and based upon a real incident (the "Walsh Street Shootings") and a real dysfunctional crime family (the Pettingill family), it is as impressive a film as I have seen in many years.
It is told from the point of view of an innocent, thrown into the jungle that is his extended family. Only this family is one of sociopathic criminals, led by grandma Janine "Smurf" Cody (Jacki Weaver, last seen on these shores years ago in "Picnic at Hanging Rock") along with her various sons (by various boyfriends or husbands... none of the siblings shares the same father). The oldest son is Andrew 'Pope' Cody (played by the amazing Ben Mendelsohn). The full extent of mother and son's pathology becomes apparent only slowly. The plot is full of twists and, only in looking back at it, do you realize that the arcs of each of the characters were fully pre-ordained by their flaws.
It plays like opera. Go see it. It's opened in NY and LA, and now is breaking open wider.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KhhKsKlr6U
Monday, January 4, 2010
Beckett in Exile, and the genesis of "Godot"
Those who know me well know that "Waiting for Godot" is one of my favorite plays, and one which was seminal to my becoming a writer. Those who know me well also know how much I love the south of France and, in particular, the region of Languedoc-Roussillion.
Beckett joined the Resistance movement in Paris in September of 1941 and helped pass secret information to England about German military movements. When an infiltrator began uncovering the names of Resistance members in Beckett’s group, Beckett and his companion (later his wife) Suzanne had to flee Paris and travel into the South, where they eventually found refuge in the small village of Roussillon, near Avignon.
In the French version of "Waiting for Godot" (En Attendant Godot), this village is named as the place where Vladimir and Estragon picked grapes, an activity that Beckett and Suzanne actually engaged in. This has led some scholars to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon, at least in part, represent Beckett and Suzanne in flight from Paris to Roussillon.
"A country road. A tree. Evening."
Other scholars have suggested that the situation which Didi and Gogo find themselves in has its genesis in Beckett and Suzanne's waiting in an extremely dangerous form of exile for the war to end.
In Roussillon, Beckett earned food and shelter by doing strenuous manual labor for local farmers, eventually working for a small local Resistance group, and trying to keep his identity hidden from the Germans occupying outlying areas. After the war, Beckett was awarded two French medals, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, for his contributions to the war effort.
Beckett joined the Resistance movement in Paris in September of 1941 and helped pass secret information to England about German military movements. When an infiltrator began uncovering the names of Resistance members in Beckett’s group, Beckett and his companion (later his wife) Suzanne had to flee Paris and travel into the South, where they eventually found refuge in the small village of Roussillon, near Avignon.
In the French version of "Waiting for Godot" (En Attendant Godot), this village is named as the place where Vladimir and Estragon picked grapes, an activity that Beckett and Suzanne actually engaged in. This has led some scholars to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon, at least in part, represent Beckett and Suzanne in flight from Paris to Roussillon.
Other scholars have suggested that the situation which Didi and Gogo find themselves in has its genesis in Beckett and Suzanne's waiting in an extremely dangerous form of exile for the war to end.
In Roussillon, Beckett earned food and shelter by doing strenuous manual labor for local farmers, eventually working for a small local Resistance group, and trying to keep his identity hidden from the Germans occupying outlying areas. After the war, Beckett was awarded two French medals, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, for his contributions to the war effort.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
On Nick Hynter's 1994 Revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Carousel"
I'm not one for musicals, in general, but when they do work (and they still do, even some of those written today) there is no finer melding of drama, music and dance this side of opera. Fat ladies optional. Sixteen years ago, when I was at a theater conservatory in NYC, we - the first class of playwrights at the conservatory - were privileged to attend a dress rehearsal for Nick Hytner's revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.
Carousel is one of the first American musicals to incorporate all three elements (drama, music and dance) in a story in which each song was not a departure from the development of the story but, rather, an integral part of the telling of it. One day, in the Fall of 1993, when all things still shone bright for us at Juilliard, we sat in on a technical dress for Carousel at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater. It was, in retrospect, one of the best lessons in making theater that I received as a student there. We were met, that afternoon, in the lobby of the theater by Bernie Gersten, head honcho at LCT, and Robert Crowley, a stage designer whom Hytner had brought over from London to help reconceive the musical for its New York run.
Bernie explained to us something of the history of the Beaumont and the modifications they had made to accommodate the musical. The Beaumont was designed with a square thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience. They reconstructed the square portion of the stage that projected into the house, reshaped it into a half-circle. They also set up a large turntable beneath the stage, so that a circular portion of it (including half of the circle which projected out into the audience) could rotate. This circle was used, to great effect, as the base for the eponymous carousel, as well as a means for rotating sets on and off the stage.
Bob Crowley then told us how the imagery of the circle had guided all of the decisions that he and Nick Hytner had made in re-staging the musical. He told us that they had rented a car and driven up the coast of New England, looking for images relevant to this story of a tightly knit community of New Englanders whose economic livelihood was changing from fishing to factory work. They chose to emulate painters (Wyeth, especially, but Hopper, as well) whose work whose work was tied to the region.
After this talk, we entered the theater itself, and saw a run through of the play from overture to epilogue. We were the only ones in the entire house and, speaking for myself, I felt quite privileged to be there.
The lights went to black and then, projected on the curtains, appeared a fiery red circle. Meanwhile, R&H's Carousel Waltz Overture started... one of those grand old full- orchestra overtures that composers used to write to help move the audience out of their workaday world, and into the world of the Theatre; one of those grand scores that musically foreshadow the events to come.
Everything on stage, from that moment on, happened in circles, presaging and marking the passage of time:
"It is late on a summer afternoon in a textile factory. A large clock descends from the fly and hovers over the work-floor. Julie Jordan, the heroine of the play, is at work at a loom along with a dozen other women like her. The minute hand on the clock crawls; the looms and the workers alike move in tempo to the music, in slow motion. The plant owner walks by outside, takes out his pocket watch and checks it. The music of the waltz swells up and crescendos. Finally, the clock strikes five and the whistle blows, signaling the end of the workday. The women rush from their worktables to their lockers to change back into their home clothes, and they disperse in a circular pattern like the wisps of a cloud.
The turntable beneath the stage turns, and the factory set splits open and rotates off-stage. Then, while the waltz is still playing, the lights shift and a country entertainment, a traveling carnival, appears. Carousel horses on poles fly in from the wings, each maneuvered by a roustabout, and are locked into place in hidden holes around the periphery of the turntable. The full Carousel Waltz plays as the carousel comes into being. Julie and the rest of the working girls rush in and the carnival’s barker, Billy Bigelow, helps her aboard one of the mounted wooden horses. All of this action is without words, mind you.
The music shifts, the table turns, and it is now evening of that day or the day after. There appears a gentle green hill, no more than a rise, near where the land meets the sea. It is evening with a deep blue sky, and upstage, far up the hill, a lamp burns in the window of a cottage. Julie and her friend Carrie are taking their ease at the end of a workweek, lying on the hill and looking up at the evening sky. They sing the duet You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan.
A fellow happens by. He is Billy Bigelow, a barker from Coney Island whose carnival has just pulled into Julie’s town, the fellow who helped Julie onto the carousel in the scene before. In the course of this scene the two of them go from being complete strangers to contemplating becoming a couple. The entirety of this character development is accomplished through two amazing songs: If I Loved You and What’s the Use of Wond’rin?
Billy
Well, anyway, you mean you don't love me.
That's what you said, ain't it?
Julie
Yes!
I can smell 'em, can you, ah?
The blossoms. The wind brings 'em down!
Billy
There ain't much wind tonight... Hardly any.
[Sung]
You can't hear a sound, not the turn of a leaf
Nor the fall of a wave hittin' the sand.
The tide's creepin' up on the beach like a thief,
Afraid to be caught stealin' the land!
On a night like this I start to wonder
What life is all about.
Julie
And I always say two heads are better than one to
figure it out.
Billy
[spoken]
I don't need you, I don't need anybody helpin' me.
Well, I got it figured out for myself.
We're not important. What are we?
A couple o' specks with nothin'
Look up there...
[sung]
There's a hell of a lotta stars in the sky,
And the sky's so big the sea looks small,
And two little people, you and I
We don't count at all.
[spoken]
You're a funny kid, you know?
I don't remember meetin' a girl like you.
Hey, [are] you tryin' to get me to marry you?
Julie
No!
Billy
Then what's puttin' that into my head, babe?
You're diff'rent, alright! I know what it is...
You've doped me with that little kid's face, right?
You've adjusted me!
I wonder what it'd be like...
Julie
What?
Billy
Nothin'.
No, I know what it'd be like.
It'd be awful! I can just see myself-
[Sung]
Kinda scrawny, and pale
Picking at my food,
And love-sick like any other guy.
I'd throw away my sweater, and dress up like a dude
In a dicky and a collar and a tie.
If I loved you.
Julie
[spoken]
But you don't!
Billy
[spoken]
No, I don't!
Billy
[sung]
But somehow I can see
Just exactly how I'd be
If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I'd want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn't come in an easy way
Round in circles I'd go!
Longin' to tell you,
But afraid and shy
I'd let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you'd leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you
If I loved you.
[spoken]
Aha...I'm not the kinda fella to marry anybody!
No, even if a girl was foolish enough to want me to, I wouldn't!
Julie
Don't worry about it, Billy!
Billy
Who's worried?
Julie
You were right about there bein' no wind.
The blossoms are comin' down by their selves.
Just their time to, I reckon.
Shortly thereafter, in a subsequent scene, Rodgers and Hammerstein do something which is quite amazing, something which I’ve never seen done before or since in a musical. Billy and Julie do fall in love, of course. Billy is revealed to be a tough kid from Brooklyn with a history of being on the wrong side of the law.
Julie, who matches Billy for toughness, muses - in a song which is really an internal monologue (she’s thinking the words to herself, as much as saying them to any particular person whom she shares the stage with) - about Billy’s character, and about her fate, which she knows will be entwined with his…
Julie:
[sung]
What's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad,
Or if you like the way he wears his hat?
Oh, what's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad?
He's your feller and you love him,
That's all there is to that.
And then Oscar Hammerstein does this really deft thing. The next lyric, on the surface another musing by the heroine, is also a warning directed at the audience in the theater, a premonition of what is to come…
Julie:
[sung]
Common sense may tell you
That the ending will be sad,
And now's the time to break and run away…
The warning is saying to you: GET OUT, NOW. THERE IS MUCH SADNESS AND HEARTBREAK (AND TRUTH AND LOVE AND BEAUTY) AHEAD, IF YOU STAY. The wonder of Hammerstein’s lyrics and Rodgers’ music is such that no one ever breaks and runs away. We, the audience, are rooted to our seats. We are there for the complete ride.
Carousel is one of the first American musicals to incorporate all three elements (drama, music and dance) in a story in which each song was not a departure from the development of the story but, rather, an integral part of the telling of it. One day, in the Fall of 1993, when all things still shone bright for us at Juilliard, we sat in on a technical dress for Carousel at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater. It was, in retrospect, one of the best lessons in making theater that I received as a student there. We were met, that afternoon, in the lobby of the theater by Bernie Gersten, head honcho at LCT, and Robert Crowley, a stage designer whom Hytner had brought over from London to help reconceive the musical for its New York run.
Bernie explained to us something of the history of the Beaumont and the modifications they had made to accommodate the musical. The Beaumont was designed with a square thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience. They reconstructed the square portion of the stage that projected into the house, reshaped it into a half-circle. They also set up a large turntable beneath the stage, so that a circular portion of it (including half of the circle which projected out into the audience) could rotate. This circle was used, to great effect, as the base for the eponymous carousel, as well as a means for rotating sets on and off the stage.
Bob Crowley then told us how the imagery of the circle had guided all of the decisions that he and Nick Hytner had made in re-staging the musical. He told us that they had rented a car and driven up the coast of New England, looking for images relevant to this story of a tightly knit community of New Englanders whose economic livelihood was changing from fishing to factory work. They chose to emulate painters (Wyeth, especially, but Hopper, as well) whose work whose work was tied to the region.
After this talk, we entered the theater itself, and saw a run through of the play from overture to epilogue. We were the only ones in the entire house and, speaking for myself, I felt quite privileged to be there.
The lights went to black and then, projected on the curtains, appeared a fiery red circle. Meanwhile, R&H's Carousel Waltz Overture started... one of those grand old full- orchestra overtures that composers used to write to help move the audience out of their workaday world, and into the world of the Theatre; one of those grand scores that musically foreshadow the events to come.
Everything on stage, from that moment on, happened in circles, presaging and marking the passage of time:
"It is late on a summer afternoon in a textile factory. A large clock descends from the fly and hovers over the work-floor. Julie Jordan, the heroine of the play, is at work at a loom along with a dozen other women like her. The minute hand on the clock crawls; the looms and the workers alike move in tempo to the music, in slow motion. The plant owner walks by outside, takes out his pocket watch and checks it. The music of the waltz swells up and crescendos. Finally, the clock strikes five and the whistle blows, signaling the end of the workday. The women rush from their worktables to their lockers to change back into their home clothes, and they disperse in a circular pattern like the wisps of a cloud.
The turntable beneath the stage turns, and the factory set splits open and rotates off-stage. Then, while the waltz is still playing, the lights shift and a country entertainment, a traveling carnival, appears. Carousel horses on poles fly in from the wings, each maneuvered by a roustabout, and are locked into place in hidden holes around the periphery of the turntable. The full Carousel Waltz plays as the carousel comes into being. Julie and the rest of the working girls rush in and the carnival’s barker, Billy Bigelow, helps her aboard one of the mounted wooden horses. All of this action is without words, mind you.
The music shifts, the table turns, and it is now evening of that day or the day after. There appears a gentle green hill, no more than a rise, near where the land meets the sea. It is evening with a deep blue sky, and upstage, far up the hill, a lamp burns in the window of a cottage. Julie and her friend Carrie are taking their ease at the end of a workweek, lying on the hill and looking up at the evening sky. They sing the duet You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan.
A fellow happens by. He is Billy Bigelow, a barker from Coney Island whose carnival has just pulled into Julie’s town, the fellow who helped Julie onto the carousel in the scene before. In the course of this scene the two of them go from being complete strangers to contemplating becoming a couple. The entirety of this character development is accomplished through two amazing songs: If I Loved You and What’s the Use of Wond’rin?
Billy
Well, anyway, you mean you don't love me.
That's what you said, ain't it?
Julie
Yes!
I can smell 'em, can you, ah?
The blossoms. The wind brings 'em down!
Billy
There ain't much wind tonight... Hardly any.
[Sung]
You can't hear a sound, not the turn of a leaf
Nor the fall of a wave hittin' the sand.
The tide's creepin' up on the beach like a thief,
Afraid to be caught stealin' the land!
On a night like this I start to wonder
What life is all about.
Julie
And I always say two heads are better than one to
figure it out.
Billy
[spoken]
I don't need you, I don't need anybody helpin' me.
Well, I got it figured out for myself.
We're not important. What are we?
A couple o' specks with nothin'
Look up there...
[sung]
There's a hell of a lotta stars in the sky,
And the sky's so big the sea looks small,
And two little people, you and I
We don't count at all.
[spoken]
You're a funny kid, you know?
I don't remember meetin' a girl like you.
Hey, [are] you tryin' to get me to marry you?
Julie
No!
Billy
Then what's puttin' that into my head, babe?
You're diff'rent, alright! I know what it is...
You've doped me with that little kid's face, right?
You've adjusted me!
I wonder what it'd be like...
Julie
What?
Billy
Nothin'.
No, I know what it'd be like.
It'd be awful! I can just see myself-
[Sung]
Kinda scrawny, and pale
Picking at my food,
And love-sick like any other guy.
I'd throw away my sweater, and dress up like a dude
In a dicky and a collar and a tie.
If I loved you.
Julie
[spoken]
But you don't!
Billy
[spoken]
No, I don't!
Billy
[sung]
But somehow I can see
Just exactly how I'd be
If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I'd want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn't come in an easy way
Round in circles I'd go!
Longin' to tell you,
But afraid and shy
I'd let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you'd leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you
If I loved you.
[spoken]
Aha...I'm not the kinda fella to marry anybody!
No, even if a girl was foolish enough to want me to, I wouldn't!
Julie
Don't worry about it, Billy!
Billy
Who's worried?
Julie
You were right about there bein' no wind.
The blossoms are comin' down by their selves.
Just their time to, I reckon.
Shortly thereafter, in a subsequent scene, Rodgers and Hammerstein do something which is quite amazing, something which I’ve never seen done before or since in a musical. Billy and Julie do fall in love, of course. Billy is revealed to be a tough kid from Brooklyn with a history of being on the wrong side of the law.
Julie, who matches Billy for toughness, muses - in a song which is really an internal monologue (she’s thinking the words to herself, as much as saying them to any particular person whom she shares the stage with) - about Billy’s character, and about her fate, which she knows will be entwined with his…
Julie:
[sung]
What's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad,
Or if you like the way he wears his hat?
Oh, what's the use of wond'ring
If he's good or if he's bad?
He's your feller and you love him,
That's all there is to that.
And then Oscar Hammerstein does this really deft thing. The next lyric, on the surface another musing by the heroine, is also a warning directed at the audience in the theater, a premonition of what is to come…
Julie:
[sung]
Common sense may tell you
That the ending will be sad,
And now's the time to break and run away…
The warning is saying to you: GET OUT, NOW. THERE IS MUCH SADNESS AND HEARTBREAK (AND TRUTH AND LOVE AND BEAUTY) AHEAD, IF YOU STAY. The wonder of Hammerstein’s lyrics and Rodgers’ music is such that no one ever breaks and runs away. We, the audience, are rooted to our seats. We are there for the complete ride.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Snow Was General All O'er Ireland...
On the eve of our first real snowfall of the season, from possibly the single best piece of short fiction ever written in the English language:
-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
On "Avatar," "Lord of the Rings" and "Gangs of New York" and Why Motion Capture and Green Screen Will Never Replace Live Action Acting and Filming on Back Lot Sets and Locations
Jim Cameron's Avatar is set for a holiday-weekend opening, and already his detractors are sharpening their knives. Costing $380 million to make and market (on a production budget of $230 million), Avatar, which is Cameron's first feature since Titanic, is among the most expensive films ever made. Employing an innovative camera system allowing the director to "fly" a virtual camera through a computer-generated world, much of the action is depicted using CGI and the motion-capture technology which allowed Peter Jackson to render Gollum based upon Andy Serkis' performance on a green-screen stage in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is estimated that the film will have to do $217 million domestically to recoup its costs (by comparison, Titanic did $600 million domestically, and $1.84 billion worldwide). Shot in 3-D, part of what is riding on its success or failure is the extent to which audiences will pay a premium price to sit through a 3D feature.
Whether Avatar ultimately proves to be DeMille's Birth of a Nation, on the one hand, or Cimino's Heavens Gate, on the other, I doubt that the CGI motion-capture technology will make a heavy inroad as against live-action sequences for all but unique character parts.
C O N T I N U E D...
Whether Avatar ultimately proves to be DeMille's Birth of a Nation, on the one hand, or Cimino's Heavens Gate, on the other, I doubt that the CGI motion-capture technology will make a heavy inroad as against live-action sequences for all but unique character parts.
C O N T I N U E D...
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