#240610 ~ SHRINKAGE, RUMBLINGS, SONDHEIM'S STUFF
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 10, 2024.
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my (mostly) weekly newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
For this week’s opener, I lift this video featuring the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles and their take on singer-songwriter Wrabel’s anthem, “The Village”…
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your monthly allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! yo NewYorker! how’bout it Vulture!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
#NowClickThis…
Wherein I highlight a dozen or so of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few weeks…
at his substack Angeles Stage, longtime LA theatre critic Don Shirley surveys what he calls the “shocking shrinkage” of local theatre coverage at the Los Angeles Times, which recently did not publish reviews for “any theatrical productions in southern California” for an entire month;
at the Denver Gazette, veteran arts journalist John Moore considers how a “decline in [arts] coverage is bad for local arts organizations and bad for potential audiences,” warning that “everyone hates a critic – until there are no more critics”;
at Vulture, freelance arts writer Boris Kachka contemplates whether, in the 2024-25 season, the commercial theatre industry might have hit “Peak Theater” wherein “anything might work and anything might fail” but “nobody knows how to succeed on Broadway anymore”;
The New York Times’s Alexis Soloski and Amir Hamja offer a stunning visual essay detailing how The Outsiders team made the breathtaking rumble that ends Act1 (which is probably my favorite sequence in any Broadway musical in recent memory);
at his Theater Wow substack, arts writer Jim McDermott — elaborating on his recent Dance Magazine article — reflects on the 40th anniversary of La Cage aux Folles by talking to some of “the amazing 10 men and 2 women who sang and danced in drag as the Cagelles”;
the convergence of his third Tony nomination and “Pride Month” has afforded actor Jonathan Groff a number of feature interview opportunities and — as confirmed by his Interview conversation with Jake Nevins; Daniel Reynold’s piece in Out; and this appearance on CBS Mornings — Groff gives good interview, but none quite so compelling as Michael Schulman’s “backward glance” in The New Yorker;
Playbill editor-in-chief Diep Tran talks to PBS Great Performances producer David Horn about “what audiences can do to make sure more shows are filmed for broadcast”;
The New Yorker’s Helen Shaw goes deep with playwright (and now film director) Annie Baker about movie directing — “an art that, for her, seems to turn on an almost metaphysical question of privacy”;
Playbill’s Logan Culwell-Block talks to director/writer/performer Schele Williams about how the intergenerational (Black) joy is at the heart of her two current Broadway shows (The Wiz and The Notebook) is “about flexing audiences’ empathy skills”;
noting the passing of the expansively influential theatre critic/scholar/dramaturg Elinor Fuchs (1933-2024), two of Fuchs’s students — Magda Romanska (writing at The Theatre Times) and David Bruin (writing at American Theatre) — offer their remembrance. See also the force of Fuchs in this 2015 interview from The Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
On Selling Sondheim’s Stuff…
A few weeks ago, word spread among among the online theatre commentariat — thanks largely to this article by Playbill’s Logan Culwell-Block — that “The Collection of Stephen Sondheim” was going up for public auction at this month. To say it caused a stir is an understatement. But for the likes of me — a historian of popular performance raised in a “sale-ing” family (as in “garage sale-ing”) — the act of rummaging through a celebrity auction catalog always delivers unexpected rewards. I’ve only ever bid (and lost) in one such auction but, whenever celebrity “estate sale” auctions are announced, I know I will soon be poring over every page in the catalog (or website) to experience the curiously potent, always poignant, and sometimes profound glimpse that such events give into a life lived.
So of course I read the entire catalog for the Sondheim auction. And of course I pondered what I mid bid for. The following, then, are the five items — in ascending order of priority — from the Sondheim auction catalog on which I would seriously consider bidding if I happened to be I sitting on piles of cash. Each image links to the catalog description and is followed by my brief explanation of my why I am so drawn to these particular objects. (NOTE: It does seem that the two handmade games — my #4 and #2 — have been removed from the public auction.)
5: Golden Telephone Paperweight
This is my kind of collectible. Small. Strange. Specific. I love how it makes me think of the way Sondheim used telephones in Merrily and Company and — given that I have a long-neglected in-process show that is (ahem) about telephones — I like thinking that it might serve as a much-needed visual reminder for me to “finish that hat” (if you will) in some meaningful way.
4: “And Then You’re Camp” Boardgame
I just f’n love that Sondheim, while a striving artist in his early 20s, busied his creative brain by building handcrafted board games. (Because…um…yeah…me too!) I just love that Sondheim appears to also have been drawn to how boardgames of mid/late-20th century are undergirded by narrative and/or critique while also dappled with just enough serendipity and chance to keep the chaos-fun factor rolling. And, yeah, launching a handcrafted game among a group of friends can be like launching a new show (especially when you’re waiting for your chance to launch an actual show ). So it would just be so cool to play inside Sondheim’s brain as he worked inside another cultural form I love almost as much as I love musicals. Plus the promise of discerning Sondheim’s particular points of pop culture points of preference (or disdain) is an added bonus for this one.
3: Op-Art Inspo Print
I think it’s pretty. I like how the color combination — so late/mid-20th century, yet oddly contemorary — is so comforting. I love how the embedded squares seem so even, yet also oddly “off” — evoking that balance of precision and tricksiness that is just “so Sondheim” to me. Plus its implicit call out to the lyric “rushing to their classes in optical art/ wishing it would pass” is fun, and the print strikes me as something my partner would appreciate as much as I. In short, it’s exactly the kind of print I could imagine myself enjoying for a very very long time.
2: Producers Game
We’ve established that I love that Sondheim made handcrafted boardgames (see #4 above) but this is one I find most intriguing. I would love to play it through, and then “read” the whole thing card by card, if only to sneak a peek into Sondheim’s analysis/critique of how Broadway producing “worked” in the late/mid-20th century. I know there’s an essay/article in there and I want to be the one to write it. Here’s hoping that whoever snags this one has plans to refabricate it for widespread release, or at least publish it as an interactive book… I so want to play.
1: A Golden Plate
Here’s where I get weirdly sentimental. The items I’ve selected from the catalog all have personal resonance for me, sure, but — when I saw this listing — I actually gasped…because I have a “Golden Plate Award” too!!! My golden plate — which, I dunno, might currently be at my mom’s house? — was one of several unexpected bonus trophies I got after I was selected as the first place winner in the 1986 Voice of Democracy contest and remains the prize I’ve always been most perplexed by.
Yep. That’s mine above on the right, next to Steve’s on the left. Mine was the “youth” version, which might explain why I only have a “gold rim” on my plate. But, then again, there might just have been design changes in the time separating my receiving mine and Sondheim receiving his twenty years later. (FUN FACT: Joseph Papp got his Golden Plate the same year as me, so we’d need to rummage through Joe’s stuff to see if his plate looked more like mine or Steve’s.) But the notion that Sondheim and I both were awarded these weird golden plates is as deeply hilarious to me as it is oddly moving. And the weird fact of his plate makes me love the weird of mine in a whole new way. Which is why — if I happened to have it in me (or my wallet) to actually bid — I would go hard for this one…
And Lest I Forget — This Week in Fornésiana…
Wherein I highlight noteworthy recent or upcoming engagements with the life, work and legacy of legendary playwright, director and teacher María Irene Fornés...
María Irene Fornés’s “first” play, La Viuda (1966) will receive its first ever full NYC production — with a NEW translation by Olga Sanchez-Saltveit — this summer when The Dogteam Theatre Project presents it at the Atlantic Theater’s Stage 2 in Manhattan, beginning July 10 and continuing through August 4 . Tickets available NOW.