Essays about Culture Page 227

Any salesperson knows that the best product is one that sells itself. It’s this kind of seller’s good fortune with which Robert Schlosser, audience development director for Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group (which includes the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson at the Doolittle), is well acquainted. If the recent bevy of successful productions at…

Theatre is not only a profession for playwright, actor and director Marion Isaac McClinton–he readily acknowledges that it saved his life. “It kept me sane,” he says. “It kept me focused. It was something I could look at and say it was positive.” This Minneapolis-based artist, a former drug user and alcoholic who dropped out…

The novel ‘The War Of The Worlds’ was written in 1898 by H.G Wells. Wells was a well known author, he write many other books this being his most successful. In this period of time optical microscopes only recently became powerful enough to see bacteria, transportation was only by foot, bicycle, horse and steam engine…

On paper, Julia McKenzie and Stephen Sondheim couldn’t seem a less likely couple. She’s the archetypal English suburbanite who lists “cooking and gardening” as her hobbies in Who’s Who. He’s the quintessential New York cosmopolite, an overtly brilliant wit and lover of puzzles whose musicals have transformed the American theatre. And yet mutual admiration societies…

We’ve just witnessed a winter of considerable discontent, as several artistic and managing directors in various parts of the country were recently removed from their positions in ways that appeared to the profession and the public as callous, hasty, unprofessional or at best confusing. While it is not always possible to control the treatment of…

I met Helen Hayes in the late 1960s in New York City, when I was serving the APA-Phoenix Repertory company as its one and only assistant director. The company’s fortunes were definitely on the rise in ’67 and ’68 when founder Ellis Rabb invited into its ranks such esteemed and memorable stars as Miss Hayes,…

Slow-moving disintegration has taken hold of the farmhouse in rural upstate New York. The house sinks into the ground and rooms drift into each other, leaving moldings, doorjambs and window frames stranded. Grass, weeds and shrubbery creep in; full-grown trees take root in the corners, giving the place the look of a surreal ruin. Playwright…

Arguably, the single most important development in Canadian theatre in the last decade or more has been the fringe festival phenomenon. Loosely modeled on the enormous Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland–which sprang up alongside that city’s official festival and now dwarfs it in size the first fringe theatre festival in Canada took place in Edmonton in…

Before he became a one-man industry in the horror field–a prolific and seemingly tireless producer of scary stories, novels, movies and comic books author-illustrator Clive Barker worked in the theatre. In the 1970s, after studying English literature and philosophy at his hometown university, the Liverpool-bred Barker, then in his early twenties, moved to London and…

She had planned to spend the early summer in Central Park rehearsing Henry VIII, a play about, among other things, the inheritance of a man’s powerful position by a woman. But when the 26-member board of directors of the New York Shakespeare Festival summarily dismissed JoAnne Akalaitis from her job as the festival’s artistic director…