Archive for category theater
Sara Hickman on The Best of Times
Article first published as Musician Sara Hickman on The Best of Times on Technorati.
The Best of Times
During 2010, in the wake of the Texas Legislature’s budgetary cuts for arts funding, Sara Hickman, the Texas State Musician of the Year, decided to use her position to raise funds and awareness for the importance of arts education (and the funding of it) for children. More exactly, she spearheaded a collaborative effort–with a variety of Texas artists including Shawn Colvin, Willie Nelson, Rhett Miller, Robert Earl Keen as well as many more–to record a collection of Hickman’s own songs. The project, The Best of Times, was recently released as a two-CD, 38-cut collection by Waterloo Records. All proceeds from the sale of the CD set go directly to the Theatre Action Project, a non-profit that supports unique arts programs for more than 16,000 young people. To fully grasp the drive behind her charitable efforts, I recently email interviewed Hickman.
How did you go about getting all of the many fellow talented people who contributed their musical talents to Best of Times?
I knew I had, at least, a year to start lining up musicians to record for The Best of Times because Willie Nelson, who also recorded for the album, was the State Musician before my position took place. So, I immediately made a “wish list” and began calling/emailing/asking in person. I kept a giant chart on the wall with the names of artists/bands I had contacted, the titles of songs I had sent, if they had responded, if they were in the studio, if they had finished recording, if I had the recording.
Ryan Dunlavey on Action Philosophers Play Adaptation
Posted by admin in comedy, comics, theater, Uncategorized on October 12, 2011
Article first published as Ryan Dunlavey on Action Philosophers Play Adaptation on Technorati.
Action Philosophers
Action Philosophers, the comic book series by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, has been adapted for the theater by award-winning playwright Crystal Skillman (who happens to also be Van Lente’s spouse). The play has been acclaimed for capturing the flavor of the comics series’ comedic exploration of several world philosophers. Action Philosophers is currently in a limited run through October 16 (Thursday & Friday at 8 pm, Saturday & Sunday at 7 pm) at the Brick Theater (in cooperation with Impetuous Theater Group). Dunlavey recently took the time to share his thoughts with me via email on the comic series’ successful transition to the theater.
When you and Fred first developed Action Philosophers, did you ever envision it being adapted for theater?
Never. I arrogantly believed that it was completely unadaptable to other mediums and it would exclusively live and die on the comic book page, but Crystal Skillman, director John Hurley and the actors have done a fantastic job of proving me wrong!
Interestingly enough (maybe only to me) Action Philosophers originally came about when I asked Crystal to collaborate on a comic with me, but then Fred got to me first!
Why I Love the Library of Congress: Marx Brothers
April 1921 Marx Brothers Item
Every once and awhile I write a post that suggests ways to appreciate where our (if you’re U.S. based like myself) taxes go. The Library of Congress is a fine example of our taxes being used in a delightful (to me, at least) manner.
On New Year’s Eve, TCM aired a Marx Brothers marathon. For whatever reason, seeing the films again (I grew up in the 1970s in a family that made you respect the Marx Brothers from birth) made me wonder: “What kind of documents does the Library of Congress have on the Marx Brothers?”
A quick search turned up this collection of Library of Congress details. What really caught my attention, though, was an April 10, 1921 New York Tribune piece covering the Marx Brothers first film (which was lost seemingly forever, after only one public screening), Humor Risk. As noted by IMDb, the silent film was written by Jo Swerling, who would go on to write Pennies from Heaven, The Pride of the Yankees, and It’s A Wonderful Life. The Marx Brothers would not make another film until 1929′s The Cocoanuts.
Lilli Carré on Eyeworks Festival
A few weeks back, Lilli Carré dropped me a note about Eyeworks, the experimental animation festival that she’s co-directing with Alexander Stewart on this Saturday, November 6 at Chicago’s DePaul CDM Theater. As detailed at the festival’s website: “Eyeworks is a new film festival featuring abstract animation and unconventional character animation. Festival programs showcase outstanding experimental animation of all sorts: classic films, new works, overlooked masterpieces, and quirky footnotes of history.
Tom DeSavia on Notable Music Co.
Tom DeSavia
“Notable Music loves you very, very much.” It’s not everyday that you run across a company with a motto like that. But do a search for Notable Music Co. and that’s a phrase that the company communicates fairly consistently. A music publishing company founded by composer/songwriter Cy Coleman in the early 1960s, Notable Music has been expanding in recent years. Even though Coleman died in 2004, with his widow Shelby Coleman serving as president with Damon Booth as VP/GM and Tom DeSavia as VP/Creative, Notable Music is “as committed to representing new and developing talent as it is in promoting the legacy of what we believe is one of the great independent music publishing catalogs of our time.” DeSavia was kind enough to recently answer a few questions. My thanks to him for his time. Given the shifting landscape of the music industry, after talking to DeSavia, I’m intrigued at the opportunities and successes that Notable Music have achieved and the upcoming projects it has planned (anytime someone mentions a new Sam Phillips project, I’m a happy man). Before jumping into the interview, however, please consider this paragraph from Notable Music: “A few of the artists who have recorded & performed the Notable Music & Portable Music repertoire include: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Sarah Vaughan, James Brown, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Isaac Hayes, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Shirley Horn, Sammy Davis Jr., The Jackson 5, Michael Buble, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Queen, Fiona Apple, Wilson Pickett, Shirley Bassey, Nancy Wilson, Dusty Springfield, Sam Phillips, Patty Griffin, Madeleine Peyroux, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss.”
Tim O’Shea: Last year when you and Notable Music VP/GM Damon Booth were interviewed at RM64, Booth said: “One of my goals for Notable when I started was for it to be a full-fledged music company. We’re publishers primarily, but if our songwriters need to make a record, then let’s get a record made and find a home for it.” The music industry seems to be changing drastically on a regular basis. How hard is it to expand your opportunities in such a climate?
Tom DeSavia: It’s actually one of the fun parts of the job. I’m always saying it’s 1956 all over again… meaning it’s like the dawn of rock and roll… ‘pop’ music sales, for lack of a better term, is not the massive business it was, so a lot of the financial muscle behind it has lost/is losing interest in music as an ‘industry’… so it’s moving back to a ‘small business’ mentality, and the canvas is blank… the business is being reinvented on what it’s going to be for the next 40 years. You have to do everything – and half the fun of it is making it up as you go along, because most of the old rules no longer apply.
Robert Sellers on Hellraisers
Posted by admin in Film, late night TV, pop culture, talk show, theater on September 29, 2010
Hellraisers
Some people like to raise hell, some people like to document the hellraising. Fortunately for this interview, writer Robert Sellers is a member of the latter group. Sellers is the author of Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed, as well as Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson and An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety. In this email interview we discuss both books and more. My thanks to Sellers for his time, as well as John Karle of St. Martin’s Press for helping to arrange the interview.
Tim O’Shea: Would you say with the 24/7 news cycle mixed with the fact PR people can no longer sweep heavy drinking under the table as easily, is the era of celebrity hellraising done to a certain extent?
Robert Sellers: I think so. Our hellraisers were lucky in that their misbehaviour was only witnessed by a select few, so tales of their debauchery have become almost mythologized. Today celebrities’ every involuntary movement is recorded on some tosser’s mobile phone and then put on You Tube in a time span that’s shorter than their dick.
O’Shea: What attracted you to documenting the partying ways of these four actors (Burton, O’Toole, Harris & Reed) in particular?
Sellers: These guy’s bad behaviour was laced with a bit of style and humour. Take the time O’Toole was refused a drink after hours so he simply pulled out his cheque book and bought the pub. There was a jaw dropping audacity about their pranks and a twinkle in their eyes that made the public forgive them almost anything, which you just don’t have with today’s celebrity yobs. Also, back in those wilder and better days drinking was very much a macho culture; a chap could hold his booze and all of these hellraisers could drink each other under the table. Today it’s almost a prerequisite to appear everywhere completely out of your head and hopeless. The new breed of bad boy is not terribly sophisticated. Burton et al could always turn on the charm, pissed or not; this new lot can hardly string a sentence together.
Lance Roger Axt/Bill Dufris on Starstruck
Starstruck Audio Drama
Audio drama is a craft that I’m glad to see alive and well, and aiming to adapt to new technologies. One current example is Starstruck, soon to be released by The AudioComics Company. As described at the site: “Buck Rogers meets Barbarella meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy… The Off-Broadway Sci-Fi Comedy Masterpiece that spawned a comic book revolution comes to audio October 31! Written by Elaine Lee with Susan Norfleet and Dale Place, featuring characters from the comic by Lee and Michael Kaluta. First on compact disc, and pay-per-MP3s downloads, Starstruck rides the airwaves later this fall!” To mark the impending release, I interviewed AudioComics Company’s Lance Roger Axt and Bill Dufris.
Also as noted at the website: “Starstruck compact discs will be $22.95, not including tax and postage and handling. These are 4-panel 2-disc eco wallets … The cut-off date for CD orders is October 20, 2010. Your CD will be mailed directly to you on November 3, 2010, so when you place your order, make sure you write down your correct mailing address. Compact discs will be mailed first class USPS … Please note that these CD’s are not available in direct maket comic book stores or big box book stores like Borders, this is an item you can only purchase from the AudioComics Company webstore. And unfortunately these are only available in the States, but for our overseas Starstruck fans, the MP3 downloads are forthcoming, and worldwide. Info on MP3 downloads to come next month.” As Lance told me prior to finalizing this interview: “AudioComics has been a five year journey which is now finally taking shape, and I’m pleased to say that Bill and I have, beyond this inaugural production, at least ten other comic-to-audio projects to keep us busy between now and the end of 2012!” My thanks to Axt and Dufris for the interview. Also, please be sure to check out the AudioComics page on Facebook.
Tim O’Shea: First off, Lance, I saw your post about attending San Diego–can you talk about how much you enjoyed meeting Stan Freberg?
LANCE ROGER AXT: Some people came to San Diego to see Tron or Green Lantern footage, others wanted to see the cast of True Blood; me, I wanted to meet Stan Freberg. And I’ll tell you something, I can honestly say that I was humbled to be in his presence. It’s been brought up on many forums and comments pages, especially in the wake of the passings of Frazetta and Williamson, to appreciate the artists who are still with us. In my case, those artists are people like Stan Freberg, the Firesign Theatre, Yuri Rasovsky, Tom Lopez of ZBS. These people took radio drama out of the golden age, the “old timey” way of writing and acting, and showed audiences that with audio there are no limitations…so, yeah, meeting Stan was a real highlight of my first trip to SDCC. Not to mention he was the nicest, most approachable person, both he and Hunter. It’s hard to find the words now…the sound man’s gone silent.
Hal Duncan on His Fiction, Other Creative Pursuits
Posted by admin in branding, Film, Literature, Music, philosophy, poetry, theater on August 18, 2010
Hal Duncan
I always appreciate when a friend of the blog broadens my area of knowledge by suggesting an interview subject. This week, thanks to a suggestion from Allison Baker (of MonkeyBrain Books), I present my interview with self-described strange fiction writer Hal Duncan. Here’s a snippet of Duncan‘s bio: “A member of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, his first novel, VELLUM, won the Spectrum Award and was nominated for the Crawford, the BFS Award and the World Fantasy Award. As well as the sequel, INK, he has published a poetry collection, SONNETS FOR ORPHEUS, a stand-alone novella, ESCAPE FROM HELL!, and various short stories in magazines such as Fantasy, Strange Horizons and Interzone, and anthologies such as NOVA SCOTIA, LOGORRHEA, and PAPER CITIES.” In addition to discussing his theories on fiction as well as his work in general, he and I also discussed a musical recently produced that was written by him–and the experience of writing a screenplay. I always thank folks when they give me the honor of their valuable time, but I have to give Duncan an extra big thanks for the level of detail and consideration he gave to his answers.
Tim O’Shea: Your first novel, Vellum, was translated into several different languages. How much were you involved in that process? Can you think of any country where you were pleasantly surprised to find readers took strongly to the book?
Hal Duncan: With some of the translations I’ve had no involvement at all; with others there’s been a lot of back-and-forth. They’re not the easiest books in the world to translate by a long shot, I know; there’s all manner of poetic techniques, dialect, wordplay, even a mixture of mythical, historical, and alternate-history settings that means passing references could be authentic history or utterly spurious. I regard my translators with a mixture of shame at what I put them through and wonder at the fact they’re tackling it. So if there’s anything I can do to help, I’ll do it. It’s fascinating to see the process anyway.
Guest Post, Sort of, From the Queen Pirate
So, my good friend, Tracy Van Voris ([aka Queen Pirate of the Crumsy Pirates] one of the first folks interviewed for this blog), periodically posts comments in the Who Talks to Tim? blog entry. Today she posted a comment that is just so great and topical, I’m giving it the spotlight it so richly deserves.
Take it away, Tracy.
Hello, my name is Tracy, and I am a World Cup Addict.
Hey, I do likes me some euro-football in general – I do listen to matches on BBC5, follow some of the dailies, etc., throughout the year. But I wouldn’t call myself a “superfan” of the sport by any means…oh, no…just because I can name more that 20 international players and their respective club teams does NOT mean I am a soccergeek….it’s just that:
Well, I freaking LOVE the World Cup. I’ve been watching it some since the ’80s, and ever since mon capitan, ZiZou, captured my heart with Le Bleu several tournaments ago…and yes, my husband understands as he’s been dealing with a mancrush on that Brazilian Kaka…every four years, I just can’t. Stop. Watching.
And now. Now I have to choose between the country of my ancestors (the ones who aren’t from the British Isles, anyway), and those cuties from Espania. What to do, what to do?
Well, I’ll manage.
And then by Monday morning, I’ll be wanting to come back to humanity and see some old friends….so what will you be doing this upcoming week, mi amigo? Want to get together sometime? We’ve got a CD with your name on it, and a perfect place for some Jamaican food!
Hugs!
T. – happy to finally come out of the closet to you on this World Cup matter
I would call you to see if you want to grab a beer this weekend, Tracy. But I think the World Cup will have your full attention this weekend.
New York Times Covers James Comtois’ The Little One
It’s turning into a Crystal Skillman weekend (in a manner of speaking) given that she gave me the headsup on this latest item. Honestly, I think this is the first time where someone I covered at the blog would go on to be interviewed by the New York Times. Let me clarify, the fact that James Comtois, the playwright behind The Little One (who I interviewed a few weeks back) has nothing to do with my coverage.
Comtois is a talented and intelligent fellow (and quite easy to interview), so it makes sense he would be included in this June 22 piece by Jason Zinoman regarding the growing popularity of the horror genre in New York theater. The Little One opened its run on June 18. I never would have made a connection between Edward Albee and horror, but Comtois connects the dot for readers in the story.
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