On Thanksgiving Day, we had turkey with all the trimmings. We ate turkey sandwiches late Thursday night, turkey and eggs on Friday morning, turkey casserole on Friday night with leftover sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, pumpkin pie and stuffing stuffed in cornbread. My partner, Tom, puts a layer of stuffing and bits of turkey scrounged from […]
Theatre 101
11/29/2013 Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude … and I have so much to be grateful for, personally and for the theatre as well. I am grateful … To have a theatre open and doing well, with a few bumps in the road from time to time, but none insurmountable and none which would cause […]
Why do we want to look like Opryland? Why do we want to be Franklin? We are Clarksville. We spend so much money, energy and time paying at least five city workers to wind cheap Christmas lights around all of those tree branches. They started at the end of October (has Halloween ever lasted so […]
The New York City Opera has closed. It had shared the same theatre as George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, after leaving its original home of City Center to move uptown a few blocks to what was then the new Lincoln Center. After 75 years it closed, selling off entire productions and later piecemeal (as […]
Just as one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, the opposite is also very true. One good example can make all the difference in the world. Enter two newbies — Eli Jolley and Jake Jessup — two aspirants who are not totally green, but rather new to professional theatre and its machinations. Eager to […]
I spent one of those special lazy autumn afternoons sitting on the multi-columned porch of High Meadow, along with Michael Anthony Spaziani and Patrick Roberts. Before we started proper rehearsals, they wanted “to be able to talk about” The Great Gatsby. I’m not a great proponent of sitting around and talking a play to death, […]
It was just happenstance that I was in London at the exact same time as my French friend Paul, who said, “John, you must come with me to see The Rocky Horror Show.” I had no idea what I was getting myself into … Paul was just twenty, but far more world-wise than I, at […]
My longtime friend and onetime neighbor Olen Bryant wrote, “Thirty-one years? I choose not to believe that. If this is the case, you all were just children when all of this Roxy romp got underway … If this much time and endurance has happened, you can no longer validly be complaining like spoiled brats. You […]
The Zinghoppers have made a splash especially with the pre-kindergarten crowd and continue to do so on PBS. It is a wild and wooly name for educational and playful songs, repetition and interactive tomfoolery — in fact, everything first-time theatre goers thrive on. If only all theatre was this easy, fun and cleverly educational. And […]
In London’s West End Theatre District, when you purchase your ticket for the theatre, you can also at that time purchase a beverage (be it whatever you like — tea, coffee, soda, wine, scotch, brandy or any combination), which will be waiting for you in the “crush bar” at the interval (intermission). Our crush bar, […]
