Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Sunday, June 27, 2010

NYT - Cabaret: Precarious but Resilient


New York Times
June 25, 2010

Cabaret: Precarious but Resilient

Stability is a word not often used to describe New York City’s fragile cabaret world, where only a few can make a full-time living, and the clubs themselves ride an economic seesaw from week to week. But because Manhattan’s three major supper clubs — the Café Carlyle, the Oak Room and Feinstein’s at Loews Regency — are attached to hotels, their survival is not solely dependent on the box office.

That is a stability of sorts. And as the 2009-10 season draws to a close, all three clubs seem to have successfully weathered the economic downturn, at least for now. One sign of precariousness, however, was the shrinking of the Cabaret Convention, an annual clearinghouse for talent at Rose Hall.

Artistically, at least, cabaret is reasonably healthy; an optimist might even say flourishing, as younger singers like Kelli O’Hara, Maude Maggart, Nellie McKay, Johnny Rodgers and Sutton Foster have established themselves as acts that blend singing and patter into intimate, sophisticated entertainments that can’t be found anywhere else.

This year the quality of the dozen best cabaret acts far surpassed that of Broadway’s new musicals, which were so weak that “Memphis,” a flimsy, grossly inauthentic re-creation of the moment in the 1950s when rhythm & blues went mainstream, won the Tony Award for best musical.

Authenticity is a hallmark of cabaret; without it the genre would quickly wither. This is the one arena in which a beloved performer can develop into a musical sage without an expiration date. The songs of Stephen Sondheim, who turned 80 this year, almost require performers with mileage for their insights to be revealed.

Elaine Stritch and Barbara Carroll, both in their 80s, located the essences of songs like “Every Day a Little Death” (recited by Ms. Stritch in her brilliant Sondheim show at the Café Carlyle), and “With So Little to Be Sure Of” (sung by Ms. Carroll at the Oak Room, where it was part of a Sondheim suite for voice and piano).

Among the numerous tributes to the songwriter Johnny Mercer, whose centennial was celebrated last November, the most stirring was a marathon pop-jazz anthology of his songs by Marilyn Maye, now 82, at the Metropolitan Room, the best of New York’s smaller clubs.

If the new blood arriving in cabaret suggests that the genre has secured its future, there is no guarantee. Whether performers like Ms. O’Hara, Ms. Foster, Ms. McKay and Mr. Rodgers will become perennials is anyone’s guess. Right now Ms. O’Hara, with her wholesome good looks and operatically flexible soprano, and the zany, more down-home Ms. Foster, whose debut engagement at Café Carlyle ends this Saturday, are cabaret versions of America’s sweetheart.

Because they don’t need nightclub acclaim as a springboard to the Broadway stardom they have already attained, their commitment to the genre is uncertain. Ms. McKay is a downtown bohemian version of the same thing, a contemporary Doris Day with a feisty political attitude.

Only Ms. Maggart, a Los Angeles protégée of Michael Feinstein and Andrea Marcovicci, has systematically built a cabaret career similar to her mentors’, in which she embodies a genre-hopping 21st-century film noir woman of mystery. Mr. Rodgers, who leads his own band, suggests a cross between a grown-up Andy Hardy and the young Peter Allen.

Because Mr. Feinstein has his own club in which he regularly performs, he is cabaret’s unofficial godfather. He has developed from an intimate singing pianist into a dynamic standup entertainer who swings like a polite Sinatra and is an outspoken true believer in the superiority of the prerock canon, about which he knows more than almost anyone.

In the last two years he has gone out of his way to form musical partnerships. “The Power of Two,” his duet show with the Broadway heartthrob Cheyenne Jackson last June, injected a note of gay pride into a cabaret world that, despite its sizable gay audience, is reticent about sexuality, at least in its upper echelon. His duet shows with Christine Ebersole and Barbara Cook (with whom he is returning for a month of performances in September) and David Hyde Pierce, set a standard of grownup entertainment that has been almost completely abandoned by a mainstream pop culture in thrall to perpetual adolescence.

This kind of teamwork can be found in other musical partnerships, including those of Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap, K T Sullivan and Mark Nadler, Victoria Clark and Ted Sperling, Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano, and most of all John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey. In wit and musical savvy, nothing matches their smart conceptual shows, in which Mr. Pizzarelli’s jazz guitar and crooning and Ms. Molaskey’s theatrical jazz singing fuse into something that’s greater than its parts.

Their Café Carlyle show last fall, “Lost and Found,” which included renditions of everyone from Duke Ellington to Joni Mitchell, was the season’s finest, caviar in a world of canned tuna. Once you’ve acquired the taste, there is no substitute.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Hitler's Jail Time

New documents surface on Hitler's jail time

BERLIN – Adolf Hitler enjoyed special treatment while jailed in 1924, being allowed hundreds of visitors — sometimes unsupervised — including some 30 to 40 to celebrate his 35th birthday, according to a treasure trove of documents that have surfaced from the prison near Munich where he was held.

The 500 documents from the Landsberg prison were recently found by a Nuremberg man among the possessions of his late father, who had purchased them at a flea market in the 1970s, according to Werner Behringer, whose auction house in the Bavarian city of Fuerth will offer them for sale next month.

Behringer said they were packed among a bundle of books on World War I that the man had bought, and his 55-year-old son, who has requested anonymity, never knew of their existence.

"His father probably didn't know what he had there," Behringer told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Robert Bierschneider, an archivist with the Bavarian State Archives in Munich, said he had examined images of the documents that Behringer sent to him, and that they had stamps and notations that matched with others from the same prison at the time.

"The documents appear to be genuine, but to do a real examination we need to have the originals in our hands," he told the AP.

The documents are to be auctioned on July 2, with a starting price of euro25,000 ($30,677).

Though only one document is signed by Hitler himself, and much of the information about his time in prison is otherwise available, they do provide an intriguing window into his early days as Nazi leader.

Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the Nazi's abortive bid to seize power in 1923 in the notorious "beer hall putsch" coup attempt in Munich. It wasn't until a decade later, in 1933, that the Nazis would eventually come to power through parliamentary elections.

Despite being sentenced to five years in prison, Hitler was granted early release and ended up only serving about nine months of his sentence.

His right-wing politics and German nationalism won him some high-placed friends among the German establishment, including World War I hero Gen. Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff came to visit Hitler several times during his imprisonment, and the Prussian general was allowed to see the former Austrian corporal unsupervised for as long as he wanted, the documents show.

The documents include some 300 to 400 original cards listing Hitler's other visitors, including the 30 to 40 who were allowed in to celebrate his birthday with him on April 20, 1924 — only 19 days after he was put behind bars.

"His time in prison was more like a holiday," Behringer said.

Prison director Otto Leybold gushed about Hitler in a memo about the inmates on Sept. 18, 1924, saying he was always "sensible, modest, humble and polite to everyone — especially to the officers of the facility."

Hitler spent much of his time in prison writing his infamous manifesto "Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle," detailing his ideology and ambitions, but the documents also show he had time for more prosaic thoughts.

In a typed copy that prison authorities made of a letter Hitler wrote to a Munich car dealer, the future dictator says he is having a hard time making up his mind about whether to purchase a newer model Benz 11/40 or the older 16/50 because he had concerns that the higher RPM's of the motor in the former might mean that it would have more mechanical problems.

"I can't get a new car every two or three years," he wrote.

He also noted that he had many court costs to pay once he was released and asked the dealer if he might arrange a discount for him, indicating that he had his eye on a particular 11/40 on the salesman's lot.

"In any case, please reserve the gray car that you have in Munich until I have clarity about my fate (probation?)," Hitler wrote.

NYU Berlin

One of my first freelance projects.

Disappointing Classics

Alec Baldwin and NYU Commencement 2010

P.S. Tisch kicks ass.

Photo-Memory: A Walk at the Reichstag


A Walk at the Reichstag

Berlin, Germany
December 15, 2008

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Minor American Culture Shocks

Cleaning the windshield at a rest stop.
My first time on an ATV.



Monday, June 21, 2010

Tisch Salute 2010 Speech by Clay Shirky

The Theater at Madison Square Garden

May 11, 2010


Thank you, and thank you Dean Scheeder for that introduction.

It's doubly a pleasure to address you all today, both because it's an honor to be with people on such an important occasion, and because, for some of you, I've had a hand in your education. I teach at Tisch, down in Red Burns' shop, the Interactive Telecommunications Program. My official job there is teaching theory and practice of social media, which means my unofficial job is explaining why all the old people are freaking out.

As you've heard already today, there is an upheaval in the creative environment you are heading into, so this afternoon, I want to tell you some stories about other people who lived their lives in times of creative revolution. I'll start with three: Johannes Trithemus, Piet Mondrian, and Ani DiFranco.

Trithemus first. Johannes Trithemus was an Abbot in the German town of Sponheim, in the late 1400s. Now to be an Abbot in the late 1400s was no fun, because an infernal machine had been unleashed on Europe, a machine that threatened the livelihood of the scribes working for Trithemus. That was the printing press, and it could create a book 300 times as fast as a scribe copying one out by hand.

Trithemus could see where this was going. If the literate population of Europe continued to buy cheap, abundant books created on a printing press, it would be bad news for the expensive, scarce books created by the scribes. Seeing this, he decided to alert the world to the dangers of abundant media, writing a book called De Laude Scriptorum Manulium. Loosely translated from the Latin, that reads "In Praise of Writing by Hand." Even more loosely translated, it reads "Won't Someone Please Think of the Scribes?"

Trithemus finished his manuscript in 1492. Now consider his dilemma: he has to get his book read as widely as possible, so he has to get a lot of copies made, really fast. He couldn't give it to the scribes, because they wrote too slowly, so De Laude Scriptorum was printed on a printing press. The medium destroyed the message.

Next time you hear some media mogul saying "We love digital media, we're very excited about it, we just want to make sure it doesn't change anything", you can now recognize that as a 500 year old thought (and one that didn't work the first time around either.)

This is one of the hallmarks of a media revolution: when even the people who hate the new medium have to use it. But of course, the future isn't shaped by people who try to opt out of it, it's shaped by people who try to figure out what to do about it.

There's a funny painting in the Museum of Modern Art, up in midtown. It shows the rectangles of a windmill standing in a field, lit brilliant white on a sunny day -- it's very Dutch, this painting. It isn't at MoMA because of its subject, though, it's there because of its creator, Piet Mondrian.

Mondrian painted this windmill in the first decade of the 20th century; by the second decade of that century, he'd reduced his entire visual palette to colored rectangles and black lines. This was one of the most rapid and complete turns to abstraction in the history of painting. What could have driven such a dramatic change?

The camera.

For the 700 years prior, the core intuition of European painting was that people like to look at things that look like things look like. So painters got very good at making one kind of thing -- paintings -- that looked like other things -- a windmill, a person, a bowl of fruit. If your goal is to make things that look like things look like, though, it's pretty hard to beat the camera for pure visual mimicry. All of a sudden, European painting was out of its historic job.

So one day, Mondrian shows up at his studio, and there's a note pinned to his door: "While you were out...representation stopped being a good idea." Now, every painter in Europe got this memo, but the vast majority of them couldn't read it, and the vast majority of those who could just made the sign of the cross and went back to painting bowls of fruit. Mondrian, though, said "Well, this isn't what I trained for, but if this is what's happening, let's go"; he asked himself "What if we stop making paintings that look like things, and start making paintings that look like paint?"

Notice that Mondrian wasn't a photographer. This is another hallmark of revolution -- when the new medium doesn't just add new possibilities, it also changes the environment for all the old possibilities as well.

So it is today. Digital media -- the internet, the web, mobile phones -- aren't just offering creative people new opportunities, they are changing the context of older forms as well. Whatever you make -- photos or films, software or hardware, a dance or a play -- digital media is changing the context in which you work.

MoMA has the Mondrian painting up because you can see, in the gleaming rectangles of the windmill, where he's going to end up. That's hindsight, though; it's only in retrospect that we can connect the windmill with the rectangles. While the change is underway, it's much more confusing.

In 1989, the singer and songwriter Ani DiFranco found an invisible memo pinned to her studio door, and it said "The music industry doesn't make music. Musicians make music. The music industry just distributes it." DiFranco realized that if she could reach her own audience, she could be her own record label, so she founded what became Righteous Babe records.

When she did this, she wasn't regarded as a genius, she was just regarded as weird. When people talked about the music industry in the 90's, they'd say "Well, there are the major labels, and then there are the independent labels...oh, and then there's Righteous Babe."

It wasn't until the middle of this decade, when Soulja Boy Tell'em and OK Go and Radiohead all started biting DiFranco's rhymes, started talking directly with their audiences, that people realized DiFranco wasn't weird, she was visionary. Even when you get it right, it can take the world a long time to catch up.

Which brings me to the fourth person I want to talk about today, the fourth person living their lives in a period of creative upheaval: you.

We are gathered here today to salute you, on the occasion of your graduation. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it. Faculty spends a lot of time in admissions meetings, deciding which students we'd be most excited to have join us. Then we bring you into our classrooms to be part of the conversations we care about most in the world. And then, just when your work is getting really interesting, we kick you out. Why would we do that?

One model for thinking about college is that we run an intellectual conveyor belt. You enter at one end and as you move along, as we stuff you full of the things you need to know. Now you are at the other end, and we're going to slap a diploma on your forehead and ship you back off to the world.

A lot of people think of college education this way, but I think that's the wrong model. It'sespecially the wrong model for creative people. It's especially the wrong model for creative people in a time of creative upheaval. A better model is the relay race. When NYU hands you a diploma, we'll also be handing you the baton, both because we think you're ready to grasp it, and also because we think you can take it and run with it to places we can't get to.

The advantage you, our students, have over us, your teachers, isn't that you know more things than we do. You don't; we know more things than you. As your parents have been trying to tell you for some time now, "paying attention" plus "middle age" equals "knows lots of things." The advantage you have over us is that a lot of things we know are now wrong.

I am old enough to have come to a full adult consciousness about the way the world works back when years began with a 1. Here's something I know: the news starts at 6 pm every evening, and it ends at 7 -- there's always exactly one hour of news every day. And the only choice I have in the matter is which of three white men are going to read it to me in English.

I know a lot of things like that. I know that books are printed on paper, and come from bookstores. I know that music is printed on plastic circles, and comes from music stores. I know that if I want to hire a secretary or sell a bike, I have to go through the newspaper. I know that all publicly available media is made by professionals. I know that if I want to watch a television program, I must stand in front of the TV at the appointed hour and no other, because that is when my show will be spilling out, and I have no way of catching it and saving it for later.

To many of you in the audience, and especially those of you clad in purple gowns, this must sound like crazy talk, but believe me, life used to be like that, and it was exactly as lousy as it sounds. The advantage you have over us is that you don't have to spend any time or energy unlearning those things. Most of you don't care, and many of you don't know, how we used to do things back when years began with a one, which is good, because it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you go out into the world and try to figure what a good idea looks like right now.

I'm going to tell you a secret, a secret we've waited to share with you until literally the last day you are in our care. You will have noticed, these last couple of years, that we have been pretty insistent about you showing up on time and paying attention while we tell you what we think you need to know. But in addition to that, we also secretly hope you've learned something else. We hope you've learned to ignore us.

Now some of you, it must be said, seem to have mastered that skill, but I'm not talking about ignoring us wholesale. I'm talking about selectively ignoring us, because there will come a day, very soon, when you are out in the world doing your work, and everything you have learned will be telling you one thing, and the world will seem to be telling you another. And at that moment, we hope you go with the world.

When you do that, when you go with what the world seems to be telling you, when you read the invisible memo and try to react to it...you will probably fail. Most new ideas are bad ideas; if it were any other way, innovation would be easy instead of hard. So you have to do it again, and again. Out in the big show, out in the real world, new ideas rarely come as a result of a single eureka moment. Mondrian went from windmills to rectangles in a historical eye-blink, but it wast still ten years of his actual life. Good ideas come as a result of unending, iterated experimentation.

School, you will have noticed, is a good place to experiment, because while you are experimenting, you can fail like crazy, and your failures will be contained by the four walls of the institution, and witnessed only by people who love you, and want you to succeed. That's the advantage of school. The disadvantage of school is that your successes have also been contained by those four walls, rather than spreading out into the world where they belong.

Today might be a good day to fix that. Somebody has to figure out what a good idea looks like right now. Could be you.

Congratulations, everybody. See you in the big show.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Return from West Virginia


I returned to CT last night after a week of filming my friend Mike Wright's newest short "Hiding Games" (www.newlensproductions.com) in West Virginia where I was assistant director. Stories and pictures to come.




Thursday, June 10, 2010

Phantom in the schools

My focus on studying musical theatre and adaptation has spun a lot around 'The Phantom of the Opera" because of the many countries and forms that the story has taken on. Of course I've been studying other productions including the Kunze-Levay shows and their transformation over Europe and to Japan as well as adaptation of book to show and lyrical and book translation. Here's something I want to look into now and that's transformation from professional to non-professional. That's not to crticize the performances, but to know if the book has changed to accomodate the student environment.

Phantom is released to high schools and colleges across US and Canada


3rd June 2010

Press Release

Starting today, R&H Theatricals is accepting applications for performances of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical phenomenon by high schools and colleges across the USA and Canada, beginning September 2010.

R&H Theatricals, an Imagem Company and a division of The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization (RHO), is proud to announce that high schools and colleges in the USA and Canada will soon be able to perform the most successful musical of all time, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Applications to perform Andrew Lloyd Webber's international musical phenomenon are being accepted starting today, June 3, for performances beginning September 1, 2010.

"Andrew's passion for bringing young people into the musical theater is so deeply felt," notes RHO President Ted Chapin, "that he has authorized us to release PHANTOM to schools even while it continues to thrive on Broadway and all over the globe. We always believed that school performances of PHANTOM would bring out the best in each and every student, and the pilot productions we saw across America more than confirmed that belief."

Anticipating the release of PHANTOM to schools, R&H Theatricals created a pilot project working closely with RUG (Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group). In the 2007-8 academic year, PHANTOM was presented -- in full productions and in its entirety-- by two colleges and four high schools: Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio; Elon University, Elon, North Carolina; Carroll Senior High School, Westlake, Texas; Nyack High School, Nyack, New York; Fairfield Senior High School, Fairfield, Ohio; and Capital High School, Charleston, West Virginia.

PHANTOM was “a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Stacie Martinsen of Carroll Senior High School. “It helped our department’s recognition level go through the roof, and the number of kids who wanted to be involved in theater after PHANTOM nearly doubled.” PHANTOM was "more profitable and [received] far more media attention than any other show we've produced," said Mindy Reed of Fairfield Senior High School. "It helped gain respect from the community for our theatre program." It was a "wonderful opportunity" for Baldwin-Wallace College, said administrator Scott Plane. "There was a great deal of 'buzz' about this piece that generated a kind of energy we don't usually experience, which helped our program grow. I'd recommend PHANTOMto any school that wishes to push themselves; it's ultimately extremely rewarding."

R&H Theatricals has been representing North American performance rights to Lloyd Webber's musicals since 2001, with SUNSET BOULEVARD being the latest title to be released (for professional customers only at this time), joining CATS, JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, EVITA, ASPECTS OF LOVE, BY JEEVES, SONG & DANCE -- and now, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

PLEASE NOTE, as indicated, the release of performance rights forThe Phantom of the Opera is at this stage restricted to high schools and colleges across the USA and Canada only.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Korean Graduation

Oh and in semi-recent news: I graduated and Koreans knew all about it.
(I'm on the left, my hand is blocking my face, of course)



Jim Caruso's Cast Party

A little video I shot and edited for Jim Caruso's Cast Party.
You should go. Every Monday night. It's amazing. Seriously. Go. What else are you doing on a Monday night anyway?

Jim Caruso's Cast Party from castpartyvideo on Vimeo.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Helen Thomas

I find the "retirement" of Helen Thomas unfortunate. She's stopped her incredibly long career (reporting from the White House since the Eisenhower administration) and for reasons mostly controversial given statements she said about the Jews and Israeli-Palestini conflict. Maybe I don't look at her opinion as so angry and jaded as I should and I think excuse it or at least attribute the words to age.
Nevertheless, I was fortunate (yes, I say fortunate) enough to meet her when I was in high school. Prior to college application time, I was stuck in a limbo between pursuing the arts (which I did) or attempting something slightly more practical like journalism. Helen spoke at a reporter's panel when I attended the National Young Leaders Conference (waste of money, in my opinion). A majority of the audience was either from Texas or pretty right-wing.
Each reporter (I don't remember who they were now) introduced themselves, what they specialized in, and who they reported for. When it came to Helen, she didn't even introduce her name. She openly criticized Bush administration and US' push into Iraq - all this in lieu of introducing anything about herself, drawing uncomfortable moans from the majority of the audience. She cared little though and persisted with her opinions as the other reporters attempted to remain moderate. And though I'm not always a fan of particularly outspoken people, I had to applaud her (in my head...those kids were crazy) for being outspoken. I had seen her on television before and her reputation was no secret to me.
Helen was escorted with practically no interruption. I went right up to, introduced myself and told her I was thinking about college and journalism. It wasn't that I wanted to meet someone oppossed to the Bush administration or someone simply outspoken. I knew that there was a reputation and almost a legend behind her. She spoke to me simply, kindly, and earnestly. She smiled at me and told me how nice it was to hear what I said and then told me. I regret to say that her exact words after that escape me, but I remember more or less what she said.
Do it. And if you're passionate, do it and don't stop. Get a good education and learn as much as you can. Always be learning.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Is this why I can't find a job...

I smell movie

I'm considering a career as a casting director...

Return

It may be nothing short of laziness that I've stopped blogging. I can make the excuse that it's because I'm busy, but I hardly think that's the reason. I did, after all, create this blog to motivate myself or at least attempt to - hence the name of the blog. To push myself to keep writing or sharing or whatever it is that I do, I need to tell myself that it's not necessary to write extensively. It's okay to share a link, or a thought, or whatever and I do something with this space more regularly.