Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a film that set the standard for not just animation, but for the art of musical storytelling, garnered such critical praise in its initial theatrical release that it received multiple Academy Award nominations. Had Walt Disney been alive, he would have surely been proud — the founding father of Walt [...]
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David Mamet, the often cantankerous playwright and director, has been playing the book circuit while promoting his new page turner, Theatre. He made an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central show last night, telling the comedian that theatre is dead. Dead because Broadway is basically producing nothing but revivals of plays that weren’t funny [...]
It is nearly impossible to dismiss the fact that Broadway experienced a rather lackluster year, star-studded shows or not, as can easily be seen by the list of Tony nominations. When musicals like “Memphis” and “Million Dollar Quartet” are able to snag nods for best musical, and the dreaded “Addams Family” can be listed as having one of the best original scores, it’s certain that the creative juices flowing around Times Square were strained this past season. Perhaps this season is slightly a result of the recession bounce-back effect. In late 2008, as the realities of a recession were preparing to strike Broadway, the New York Post’s Michael Riedel reported that “backers who regularly used to cut checks for $200,000 have all but vanished.” There were, of course, Broadway cheerleaders during those hard times, claiming that art would endure and the show would go on, but what turned out to be more accurate was that the full effect of scared theatre funders and opportunistic producers would not be completely realized for years to come. Just look at the celebrity-filled stages over the past few seasons, culminating in a string of Hollywood productions this time around. From Catherine Zeta-Jones in “A Little Night Music” — audiences would never eat their musical vegetables like this show without a celebrity endorsement — Jude Law in “Hamlet,” Christopher Walken in “A Behanding in Spokane,” Denzel Washington in “Fences,” and so on. Production costs on Broadway are through the roof, as it costs upwards of $3 million to put on a play while musicals can run between $7 million and $11 million, according to FoxBusiness.com. It’s no wonder that producers felt squemish about relying on actual art to sustain a production. After all, “A Steady Rain” proved that a complete bore could become a hit merely because it featured Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, while a worthy revival like “Ragtime” couldn’t find an audience as it had no Hollywood-linked names. Continue reading Tony Awards Reflect a Boring Broadway Season  Jeffrey Katzenberg It’s no wonder that Jeffrey Katzenberg and the entire DreamWorks team were weary of Nicole LaPorte’s new book, The Men Who Would Be King: An almost epic tale of moguls, movies, and a company called DreamWorks, a sweeping look at the tumultuous creation of Hollywood’s wunderkind studio. Just five years earlier, Katzenberg’s meteoric rise to success at Disney was chronicled in James Stewart’s book DisneyWar. And earlier this year, moviegoers were treated to yet a further look at the one-time studio chairman of the Walt Disney Company in the insider-documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty, a look back at the rebirth of Disney’s animation franchise. Katzenberg, with the soft-spoken help of Roy Disney, injected new life into the animation arm of the studio following a drought that lasted more than 30 years — it wasn’t until the Katzenberg-led Little Mermaid took Hollywood by storm that critics paid attention to the integral part of Disney that birthed Mickey Mouse. Neither leaders Michael Eisner nor Frank Wells saw any life left in drawings, rather they hoped to boost the performance of live-action movies and expand Disney’s theme parks and hotels. Following a bitter, and soon-to-be court contested departure from Disney, Katzenberg found himself trying to kick start animation at DreamWorks SKG, the studio he created with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. If he could usher in a new era at Disney, certainly he could work the same magic across town. Or so he thought. Antz, the first animated release under the DreamWorks banner, only made $90 million in the U.S., or as LaPorte reports, “about as much as it had cost, thanks to high-profile voice talents… no longer were actors always agreeing to make animated films on the cheap.” Then came the traditionally animated films The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado, both failing to find expected critical praise. Spirit, Sinbad and Shark Tale rounded out the list of less than stellar pieces under the one-time animation Midas’ oversight. Despite Katzenberg being a cheerleader of traditional animation, he ignored the rest of his Disney schooling, opting instead to fill animated films with celebrities rather than heart — none of Disney’s classics relied on star power. It was the magic of fantastical storytelling, beautiful music, and even the Disney brand that made audiences fall in love with Snow White, Cinderella and the pantheon of animated masterpieces making up the studio’s rich library. Hollywood has been dabbling in the New York theatre scene since the early days of movie making, although in the beginning it was Broadway shows that ended up being adapted to the screen rather than the current trend of rushing blockbuster films to the stage. As the past few seasons on Broadway can attest, Hollywood’s [...]
So many friendly recommendations. But, wait a minute. I’m a theatre reporter. Why haven’t I seen an alert telling me someone is seeing La Cage aux Folles or Hair? After all, Broadway has just experienced an onslaught of show openings and the Tony Awards are coming up. Yet, none of my Foursquare friends are checking in to a show tonight, which is the case mostly every night. Since this year’s South By Southwest festival, it seems like every news outlet, both broadcast and print, has been latching onto Foursquare, a social networking tool that hipsters in New York City have been playing with their friends since it debuted in March of last year. A person could hardly consider themselves digital insiders, up until now, unless they were checking in to a location around town that was swarming with other in-the-know individuals. There are Foursquare badges for checking in to a venue with photo booths (“photogenic”), being a frequent gym user (“gym rat”), and eating at 20 different pizza places (“pizzaiolo”). Bravo, Zagat, and the New York Times have all joined forces with the social networking company, awarding their own special badges to select users. Yet, at the time of writing this article, there is no Broadway badge. Broadway marketers have finally harnessed the power of Facebook. A Twitter campaign for last season’s musical Next to Normal was so successful that it earned a Webby Award nomination. Now, with Foursquare gaining so much buzz, it is time or Broadway’s 21st century Mad Men to boldly go where the internet’s trendsetters are now playing, location-based applications. Continue reading Broadway Marketing Ready to Play Foursquare
Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Burnham, consider yourself warned. Playwright Donald Margulies has assumed the role of a publishing soothsayer, and what he predicts isn’t pretty. Margulies has been all but taking a midnight ride up and down Broadway’s Shubert Alley on horseback, warning all in earshot, “The end of modern publishing is coming.” Apple’s Steve Jobs might have dropped a gift from heaven into the laps of the media elite with the iPad, providing publishers of both news and books a new method of delivering their content to consumers, but if watching Margulies’ two recent Broadway plays prove anything, it’s that the method of delivery publishers should be worried about is the lack of words and unique voices. In the end, that will be the issue which ultimately brings publishing to its knees. Earlier this season, Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club staged Margulies’ play Time Stands Still, a provocative look at the world of war correspondents and how the stresses of reporting on human suffering and carnage crippled some to the point of giving up the job or having a mental breakdown. It left the fear that without a nurturing publication and editor, a vital resource to the spread of information will ultimately vanish. When news aggregators and diminishing newspaper budgets result in fewer war correspondent positions, the idea of any publication being a “paper of record” becomes threatened. Now comes a lesson to the other side of the “words” game, book publishing, in the form of Collected Stories, the latest Margulies play to be staged by MTC at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Words, and the emotional anguish that goes into creating them, are the central figures in this play, and like Time Stands Still, the future doesn’t look good for publishers. However, this time, it isn’t miniscule budgets, but a new crop of “instant gratification” writers that are playing the villain in this war. Collected Stories focuses on two women, one a seasoned writer with a weighty reputation in the publishing world, and the other a young student with All About Eve intentions. The young writer latches on to her literary hero, ultimately using the mentor up in order to reach her own level of fame. Actress Sarah Paulson plays the seemingly wide-eyed innocent that pleads to work as an assistant to her literary professor, played by Linda Lavin. Continue reading Publishers Can Take Warning from Broadway’s ‘Collected Stories’ |
   
  
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With the Tony Awards only a few days away (June 13) and nearly every theatre-oriented website extolling 
It’s Friday night. 8 p.m. After scanning Facebook for last minute status updates from friends and scrolling through a nearly endless number of tweets, it’s time to figure out what to do around New York City. My iPhone lights up with an alert message. A friend has just checked in on Foursquare at the rooftop bar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another alert. Someone else is at a Sara Silverman book signing at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square. Alert. Party at the Hotel on Rivington. Alert. Drinks at Mason Dixon.
