Catherine Fitzmaurice is the originator of Fitzmaurice Voicework, "a comprehensive approach to voice training" that is taught in acting schools, studios, workshops, and private lessons throughout the United States and the world. The January 2010 issue of American Theatre magazine (published by the Theatre Communications Group) calls Fitzmaurice one of "the great lions of the field of voice work in the U.S." and one of the "visionary innovators in the craft" of voice training for actors. Over the past thirty-five years, she has "become one of the half-dozen most influential voice teachers in the theatre," whose "legacy and enduring influence are secure." The Voice and Speech Trainers Association invited Fitzmaurice to its 2009 National Conference—along with Arthur Lessac, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg -- as one of the "foremost vocal teachers of our time."
Born in India, Fitzmaurice began acting at the age of three. At the age of seven, her family moved to England and then Ireland, and she attended English boarding schools in Surrey and Hertfordshire. From age eleven to seventeen, she studied voice, speech, verse-speaking, and acting with Barbara Bunch, who had also taught Cicely Berry as a teenager. Fitzmaurice went on to win a three-year scholarship at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she earned numerous honors and distinctions.[citation needed] While studying at Central, she also took first place in the English Festival of Spoken Poetry. Upon completion or her training, Fitzmaurice returned to Central in 1965 as a teacher of Voice, Verse-Speaking, and Prose-Reading.
While living in London, Fitzmaurice met her future husband, David Kozubei, who at one point worked as a manager of the "underground wing" of Better Books then on Charing Cross Road. Kozubei introduced Fitzmaurice to the works of Wilhelm Reich, which Fitzmaurice first explored through a group Kozubei had founded "to study Reich’s work in a practical way" (including his own method of muscle tension reduction called "Movements"). Fitzmaurice’s curiosity led her to study bioenergetic analysis (or “Bioenergetics”) with Dr. Alexander Lowen and Malcolm Brown, the latter of which she worked with until she relocated to the United States in 1968. After taking up residency in Ann Arbor, Michigan – where she earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Theatre Studies from the University of Michigan – Fitzmaurice continued to explore Reich’s work with several of Reich's trainees, including Dr. John Pierrakos. Fitzmaurice began to practice yoga in 1972, and her interest in "body-based disciplines and energy work" soon had her exploring shiatsu, meditation, and healing techniques as well as traditional voice and speech pedagogy. Fitzmaurice also holds Certificates from the International Phonetic Association and from the completion of "several bodywork and healing energy trainings," including certification as a Somatic Therapist.
Throughout all of her investigations, Fitzmaurice was also teaching, primarily for actors and performers. As a teacher both in London and the United States, she "found that some of her students were incapable of being sufficiently vocally expressive," primarily due to "inhibition caused by tension, particularly around the breathing." Her search for "methods of reducing body tension in faster and more radical ways than the voice work … at the Central School" was what led to her initial interest in Reich and her ongoing exploration of various relaxation techniques. Fitzmaurice's experimentation in combining Reichian bioenergetics with her classical training in voice and speech led to the inception of Fitzmaurice Voicework, which continued to grow and expand with the adaptation of Fitzmaurice's discoveries in yoga, shiatsu, and other psychophysical systems. Fitzmaurice cites her "five years spent teaching at Oakland University's Academy of Dramatic Art in Michigan" as her "most fertile time" in the development of the Voicework, a time when she was able to synthesize her diverse interests with "nobody overseeing what [she] did." In her early years in the United States, Fitzmaurice also worked as an actor, most notably at the American Conservatory Theatre and in the Southern California area.
In addition to teaching at the Central School and Oakland University, Fitzmaurice has taught at the Juilliard School's Drama Division, Yale School of Drama, Harvard University, New York University, Circle in the Square Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the Guthrie Theatre, and the Lincoln Center. Fitzmaurice continues to teach workshops, intensives, and teacher certifications across the world while maintaining a regular presence in both Los Angeles and New York City. She has been invited to lecture and conduct workshops in numerous venues across the world, including: the Roy Hart Center in France; the Performance Breath Conference at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London; the Purnati Arts Centre in Bali; the Congreso de Voz in Chile; and the annual conferences of both the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Voice and Speech Trainers Association. Fitzmaurice Voicework is taught at over one hundred colleges, universities, and studios worldwide by certified teachers, all of whom must complete a multi-week Certification Program taught by Fitzmaurice on a semi-annual basis in New York City and Los Angeles. One of Fitzmaurice’s two sons, Saul Kotzubei, is among the eight Master Teachers with up to thirty years’ experience in teaching the Voicework, and he currently teaches and leads workshops in the Los Angeles area. Her younger son, Jacob Kotzubei, is a private equity professional.
Adapted from-"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Fitzmaurice"
Monday, 16 June 2014
Sunday, 8 June 2014
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born March 22, 1948), properly styled and widely known as The Lord Lloyd-Webber, is a British composer and impresario of musical theatre.
Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from Queen Elizabeth II for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.
Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
His company, the Really Useful Group, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of the Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. Lloyd Webber is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools London, a prestigious performing arts school located in Chiswick, West London.
In 1968, Rice and Lloyd Webber were commissioned to write a piece for the Colet Court preparatory school, which resulted in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph in which Lloyd Webber and Rice humorously pastiche a number of musical styles such as Elvis-style rock'n'roll, Calypso and country music. Joseph began life as a short cantata that gained some recognition on its second staging with a favourable review in The Times. For its subsequent performances, Rice and Lloyd Webber revised the show and added new songs to expand it to a more substantial length. This culminated in a two-hour long production being staged in the West End on the back of the success of Jesus Christ Superstar.
In 1969 Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote a song for the Eurovision Song Contest called "Try It and See," which was not selected. With rewritten lyrics it became "King Herod's Song" in their third musical, Jesus Christ Superstar (1970).
The planned follow-up to Jesus Christ Superstar was a musical comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse. Tim Rice was uncertain about this venture, partly because of his concern that he might not be able to do justice to the novels that he and Lloyd Webber so admired. After doing some initial work on the lyrics, he pulled out of the project and Lloyd Webber subsequently wrote the musical with Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics. Jeeves failed to make any impact at the box office and closed after a short run of only three weeks. Many years later, Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn revisited this project, producing a thoroughly reworked and more successful version entitled By Jeeves (1996). Only two of the songs from the original production remained ("Half a Moment" and "Banjo Boy").
Lloyd Webber collaborated with Rice once again to write Evita (1978 in London/1979 in U.S.), a musical based on the life of Eva Perón. As with Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita was released first as a concept album (1976) and featured Julie Covington singing the part of Eva Perón. The song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" became a hit single and the musical was staged at the Prince Edward Theatre in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Elaine Paige in the title role.
Patti LuPone created the role of Eva on Broadway for which she won a Tony. Evita was a highly successful show that ran for ten years in the West End. It transferred to Broadway in 1979. Rice and Lloyd Webber parted ways soon after Evita. In an interview in 2011, LuPone commented "[Andrew Lloyd Webber] He writes crap music... Evita was his best score, Evita in its bizarreness - when I first heard it I thought 'I swear to God, he hated women' [...] There are some very romantic moments in his music, and there is some real...trash that he doesn't even think about parting with. He's not a very good editor of his own stuff."
In 1978, Lloyd Webber embarked on a solo project, the "Variations", with his cellist brother Julian based on the 24th Caprice by Paganini, which reached number two in the pop album chart in the United Kingdom. The main theme was used as the theme tune for ITV's long-running South Bank Show throughout its 32-year run.
Lloyd Webber was the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1980 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the foyer of Thames Television's Euston Road Studios. He would be honoured a second time by the television programme in November 1994 when Michael Aspel surprised him at the Adelphi Theatre.
Lloyd Webber embarked on his next project without a lyricist, turning instead to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Cats (1981) was to become the longest running musical in London, where it ran for 21 years before closing. On Broadway, Cats ran for eighteen years, a record which would ultimately be broken by another Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera.
Starlight Express (1984) was a commercial hit, but received negative reviews from the critics. It enjoyed a record run in the West End, but ran for less than two years on Broadway. The show has also seen two tours of the US, as well as an Australian/Japanese production, a three-year UK touring production, which transferred to New Zealand later in 2009. The show also runs full-time in a custom-built theatre in Bochum, Germany, where it has been running since 1988.
Lloyd Webber wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, William, who had died in 1982. It premiered at St. Thomas Church in New York on 24 February 1985. Church music had been a part of the composer's upbringing and the composition was inspired by an article he had read about the plight of Cambodian orphans. Lloyd Webber had on a number of occasions written sacred music for the annual Sydmonton Festival. Lloyd Webber received a Grammy Award in 1986 for Requiem in the category of best classical composition. "Pie Jesu" from Requiem achieved a high placing on the UK pop charts. Perhaps because of its large orchestration, live performances of the Requiem are rare.
Cricket (1986), also called Cricket (Hearts and Wickets), reunited Lloyd Webber with Tim Rice to create this short musical for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday, first performed at Windsor Castle. Several of the tunes were later used for Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard.
Lloyd Webber also premiered The Phantom of the Opera in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. He wrote the part of Christine for his then-wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd-Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in both the West End and on Broadway; in January 2006 it overtook Cats as the longest-running musical on Broadway. On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway.
Aspects of Love followed in 1989, a musical based on the story by David Garnett. The lyrics were by Don Black and Charles Hart and the original production was directed by Trevor Nunn. Aspects had a run of four years in London, but closed after less than a year on Broadway. It has since gone on a tour of the UK.
Lloyd Webber was asked to write a song for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and composed "Amigos Para Siempre — Friends for Life" with Don Black providing the lyrics. This song was performed by Sarah Brightman and José Carreras.
Lloyd Webber had toyed with the idea of writing a musical based on Billy Wilder's critically acclaimed movie, Sunset Boulevard, since the early 1970s when he saw the film, but the project didn't come to fruition until after the completion of Aspects of Love when the composer finally managed to secure the rights from Paramount Pictures, The composer worked with two collaborators, as he had done on Aspects of Love; this time Christopher Hampton and Don Black shared equal credit for the book and lyrics. The show opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 12 July 1993, and ran for 1,529 performances. In spite of the show's popularity and extensive run in London's West End, it lost money due to the sheer expense of the production.
In 1994, Sunset Boulevard became a successful Broadway show, opening with the largest advance in Broadway history, and winning seven Tony Awards that year. Even so, by its closing in 1997, "it had not recouped its reported $13 million investment."
In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a film version of "Cats", which was filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in London. David Mallet directed the film, and Gillian Lynne choreographed the film. The cast consisted of performers who had been in the show before, including Ken Page (Original Old Deuteronomy on Broadway) as Old Deuteronomy, Elaine Paige (Original Grizabella in London) and Sir John Mills as Gus: the Theatre Cat.
In 1998 Whistle Down the Wind made its debut, a musical written with lyrics supplied by rock legend Jim Steinman. Originally opening in Washington, Lloyd Webber was reportedly not happy with the casting or Harold Prince's production and the show was subsequently revised for a London staging directed by Gale Edwards, the production is probably most notable for the number-one hit from Boyzone "No Matter What" which left only the UK charts when the price of the CD single was changed to drop it out of the official top ten. His The Beautiful Game opened in London and has never been seen on Broadway. The show had a respectable run at The Cambridge Theatre in London. The show has been re-worked into a new musical, The Boys in the Photograph, which had its world première at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in April 2008.
Having achieved great popular success in musical theatre, Lloyd Webber was referred to by The New York Times in 2001 as "the most commercially successful composer in history."
On 16 September 2004, his production of The Woman in White opened at the Palace Theatre in London. It ran for 19 months and 500 performances. A revised production opened on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre on 17 November 2005. Garnering mixed reviews from critics, due in part to the frequent absences of the show's star Maria Friedman due to breast cancer treatment, it closed only a brief three months later on 19 February 2006.
Lloyd Webber produced a staging of The Sound of Music, which débuted November 2006. He made the controversial decision to choose an unknown to play leading lady Maria, who was found through the BBC's reality television show How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?, in which he was a judge. The winner of the show was Connie Fisher.
It was announced on 25 August 2006, on his personal website, that his next project would be The Master and Margarita (Lloyd Webber has stated that the project will most likely be an opera rather than a musical), however it was announced in late March 2007 that he had abandoned the project.
In September 2006, Lloyd Webber was named to be a recipient of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors with Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, Steven Spielberg, and Smokey Robinson. He was recognised for his outstanding contribution to American performing arts. He attended the ceremony on 3 December 2006; it aired on 26 December 2006. On 11 February 2007, Lloyd Webber was featured as a guest judge on the reality television show Grease: You're the One that I Want! The contestants all sang "The Phantom of the Opera".
Between April and June 2007, he appeared in BBC One's Any Dream Will Do!, which followed the same format as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?. Its aim was to find a new Joseph for his revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Lee Mead won the contest after quitting his part in the ensemble – and as understudy in The Phantom of the Opera – to compete for the role. Viewers' telephone voting during the series raised more than £500,000 for the BBC's annual Children in Need charity appeal, according to host Graham Norton on air during the final. On 1 July 2007, Lloyd Webber presented excerpts from his musicals as part of the Concert for Diana organised to celebrate the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The BBC Radio 2 broadcast a concert of music from the Lloyd-Webber musicals on 24 August 2007. Denise Van Outen introduced songs from Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, Tell Me on a Sunday, The Woman in White, Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, which Webber revived in 2006 at the London Palladium and 2002's Lloyd Webber-produced Bollywood-style musical Bombay Dreams by A. R. Rahman and Don Black.
In April 2008, Lloyd Webber reprised his role as judge, this time in the BBC musical talent show I'd Do Anything. The show followed a similar format to its Maria and Joseph predecessors, this time involving a search for an actress to play the role of Nancy in an upcoming West End production of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! The show also featured a search for three young actors to play and share the title character's role, but the show's main focus was on the search for Nancy. The role was won by Jodie Prenger despite Lloyd Webber's stated preference for one of the other contestants; the winners of the Oliver role were Harry Stott, Gwion Wyn-Jones and Laurence Jeffcoate. Also in April 2008. Lloyd Webber was featured on the U.S. talent show American Idol, acting as a mentor when the 6 finalists had to select one of Lloyd Webber's songs to perform for the judges that week.
Lloyd Webber accepted the challenge of managing the UK's entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Moscow. In early 2009 a series, called Eurovision: Your Country Needs You, was broadcast to find a performer for a song that he would compose for the competition. Jade Ewen won the right to represent Britain, winning with It's My Time, by Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren. At the contest, Lloyd Webber accompanied her on the piano during the performance. The United Kingdom finished 5th in the contest. The winner was Norway's Alexander Rybak with his world record composition "Fairytale".
On 8 October 2009, Lloyd Webber launched the musical Love Never Dies at a press conference held at Her Majesty's Theatre, where the original Phantom has been running since 1986. Also present were Sierra Boggess, who has been cast as Christine Daaé, and Ramin Karimloo, who portrayed Phantom, a role he most recently played in the West End.
Following the opening of Love Never Dies, Lloyd Webber again began a search for a new musical theatre performer in the BBC One series Over the Rainbow. He cast the winner, Danielle Hope, in the role of Dorothy and a dog to play Toto in his forthcoming stage production of The Wizard of Oz. He and lyricist and composer Tim Rice wrote a number of new songs for the production to supplement the songs from the film.
On 26 February 2010, he appeared on BBC's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross to promote Love Never Dies.
On 1 March 2011, The Wizard of Oz opened at The Palladium Theatre, starring Danielle Hope as Dorothy and Michael Crawford as the Wizard.
In 2012 Lloyd Webber fronted a new ITV primetime show Superstar which gave the UK public the chance to decide who would play the starring role of Jesus in an upcoming arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. The arena tour started in September 2012 and also starred comedian Tim Minchin as Judas Iscariot, former Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene and BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles as King Herod. Tickets for most venues went on sale on 18 May 2012.
Webber caused controversy with a series of comments about Eurovision in a Radio Times interview. He said: "I dont think there's any point in beating around the bush. I saw no black faces on the programme (Eurovision 2012). I was questioned by the press over Jade Ewen's race, and I think we would have placed second, but there is a problem when you go further east. If you're talking about Western Europe it's fine, but Ukraine, not so good." The EBU corrected Webber, telling him Ukraine's singer Gaitana was black, that year's winner Loreen for Sweden was of North African background and accompanied by a black backing dancer, and France's contestant Anggun was Indonesian. The contest organisers also told Webber that black singer Dave Benton won for Estonia in 2001. The EBU thoroughly denied racism in its show, and insisted it unites Europe for three nights in a year.
In 2013, Webber reunited with Christopher Hampton and Don Black on Stephen Ward the Musical.
Lloyd Webber has been accused of plagiarism in his works. The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen commented that: "There are two sorts of stealing (in music) - taking something and doing nothing with it, or going to work on what you've stolen. The first is plagiarism. Andrew Lloyd Webber has yet to think up a single note; in fact, the poor guy's never invented one note by himself. That's rather poor".
However, Lloyd Webber's biographer, John Snelson, countered such accusations. He acknowledged a similarity between the Andante movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor and the Jesus Christ Superstar song "I Don't Know How to Love Him", but wrote that Lloyd Webber:
...brings a new dramatic tension to Mendelssohn's original melody through the confused emotions of Mary Magdalene. The opening theme may be Mendelssohn, but the rhythmic and harmonic treatment along with new lines of highly effective melodic development are Lloyd Webber's. The song works in its own right as its many performers and audiences can witness.
In interviews promoting Amused to Death, Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, claimed that Lloyd Webber had copied a short chromatic riff from the 1971 song "Echoes" for sections of The Phantom of the Opera, released in 1986; nevertheless, he decided he did not want to file a lawsuit. The songwriter Ray Repp also claimed that Lloyd Webber stole a different melody from his own song "Till You". Unlike Roger Waters, Ray Repp did decide to file a lawsuit, but the court ruled in Lloyd Webber's favour.
The Program Guide for the San Francisco Opera's performance (2009–2010 season) of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West states (p. 42):
"The climactic phrase in Dick Johnson'a aria, "Quello che tacete," bears a strong resemblance to a similar phrase in the Phantom's song, "Music of the Night," in Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera. Following the musical's success, the Puccini estate filed suit against Lloyd Webber, accusing him of plagiarism, and the suit was settled out of court."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber"
Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from Queen Elizabeth II for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.
Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
His company, the Really Useful Group, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of the Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. Lloyd Webber is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools London, a prestigious performing arts school located in Chiswick, West London.
Professional career
Early years
Lloyd Webber's first collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice was The Likes of Us, a musical based on the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. Although composed in 1965, it was not publicly performed until 2005, when a production was staged at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival. In 2008, amateur rights were released by the National Operatic and Dramatic Association (NODA) in association with the Really Useful Group. The first amateur performance was by a children's theatre group in Cornwall called "Kidz R Us". Stylistically, The Likes of Us is fashioned after the Broadway musical of the '40s and '50s; it opens with a traditional overture comprising a medley of tunes from the show, and the score reflects some of Lloyd Webber's early influences, particularly Richard Rodgers, Frederick Loewe, and Lionel Bart. In this respect, it is markedly different from the composer's later work, which tends to be either predominantly or wholly through-composed, and closer in form to opera than to the Broadway musical.In 1968, Rice and Lloyd Webber were commissioned to write a piece for the Colet Court preparatory school, which resulted in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph in which Lloyd Webber and Rice humorously pastiche a number of musical styles such as Elvis-style rock'n'roll, Calypso and country music. Joseph began life as a short cantata that gained some recognition on its second staging with a favourable review in The Times. For its subsequent performances, Rice and Lloyd Webber revised the show and added new songs to expand it to a more substantial length. This culminated in a two-hour long production being staged in the West End on the back of the success of Jesus Christ Superstar.
In 1969 Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote a song for the Eurovision Song Contest called "Try It and See," which was not selected. With rewritten lyrics it became "King Herod's Song" in their third musical, Jesus Christ Superstar (1970).
The planned follow-up to Jesus Christ Superstar was a musical comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse. Tim Rice was uncertain about this venture, partly because of his concern that he might not be able to do justice to the novels that he and Lloyd Webber so admired. After doing some initial work on the lyrics, he pulled out of the project and Lloyd Webber subsequently wrote the musical with Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics. Jeeves failed to make any impact at the box office and closed after a short run of only three weeks. Many years later, Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn revisited this project, producing a thoroughly reworked and more successful version entitled By Jeeves (1996). Only two of the songs from the original production remained ("Half a Moment" and "Banjo Boy").
Mid-1970s
Lloyd Webber collaborated with Rice once again to write Evita (1978 in London/1979 in U.S.), a musical based on the life of Eva Perón. As with Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita was released first as a concept album (1976) and featured Julie Covington singing the part of Eva Perón. The song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" became a hit single and the musical was staged at the Prince Edward Theatre in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring Elaine Paige in the title role.
Patti LuPone created the role of Eva on Broadway for which she won a Tony. Evita was a highly successful show that ran for ten years in the West End. It transferred to Broadway in 1979. Rice and Lloyd Webber parted ways soon after Evita. In an interview in 2011, LuPone commented "[Andrew Lloyd Webber] He writes crap music... Evita was his best score, Evita in its bizarreness - when I first heard it I thought 'I swear to God, he hated women' [...] There are some very romantic moments in his music, and there is some real...trash that he doesn't even think about parting with. He's not a very good editor of his own stuff."
In 1978, Lloyd Webber embarked on a solo project, the "Variations", with his cellist brother Julian based on the 24th Caprice by Paganini, which reached number two in the pop album chart in the United Kingdom. The main theme was used as the theme tune for ITV's long-running South Bank Show throughout its 32-year run.
1980s
Lloyd Webber was the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1980 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the foyer of Thames Television's Euston Road Studios. He would be honoured a second time by the television programme in November 1994 when Michael Aspel surprised him at the Adelphi Theatre.
Lloyd Webber embarked on his next project without a lyricist, turning instead to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Cats (1981) was to become the longest running musical in London, where it ran for 21 years before closing. On Broadway, Cats ran for eighteen years, a record which would ultimately be broken by another Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera.
Starlight Express (1984) was a commercial hit, but received negative reviews from the critics. It enjoyed a record run in the West End, but ran for less than two years on Broadway. The show has also seen two tours of the US, as well as an Australian/Japanese production, a three-year UK touring production, which transferred to New Zealand later in 2009. The show also runs full-time in a custom-built theatre in Bochum, Germany, where it has been running since 1988.
Lloyd Webber wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, William, who had died in 1982. It premiered at St. Thomas Church in New York on 24 February 1985. Church music had been a part of the composer's upbringing and the composition was inspired by an article he had read about the plight of Cambodian orphans. Lloyd Webber had on a number of occasions written sacred music for the annual Sydmonton Festival. Lloyd Webber received a Grammy Award in 1986 for Requiem in the category of best classical composition. "Pie Jesu" from Requiem achieved a high placing on the UK pop charts. Perhaps because of its large orchestration, live performances of the Requiem are rare.
Cricket (1986), also called Cricket (Hearts and Wickets), reunited Lloyd Webber with Tim Rice to create this short musical for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday, first performed at Windsor Castle. Several of the tunes were later used for Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard.
Lloyd Webber also premiered The Phantom of the Opera in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. He wrote the part of Christine for his then-wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd-Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in both the West End and on Broadway; in January 2006 it overtook Cats as the longest-running musical on Broadway. On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway.
Aspects of Love followed in 1989, a musical based on the story by David Garnett. The lyrics were by Don Black and Charles Hart and the original production was directed by Trevor Nunn. Aspects had a run of four years in London, but closed after less than a year on Broadway. It has since gone on a tour of the UK.
1990s
Lloyd Webber was asked to write a song for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and composed "Amigos Para Siempre — Friends for Life" with Don Black providing the lyrics. This song was performed by Sarah Brightman and José Carreras.
Lloyd Webber had toyed with the idea of writing a musical based on Billy Wilder's critically acclaimed movie, Sunset Boulevard, since the early 1970s when he saw the film, but the project didn't come to fruition until after the completion of Aspects of Love when the composer finally managed to secure the rights from Paramount Pictures, The composer worked with two collaborators, as he had done on Aspects of Love; this time Christopher Hampton and Don Black shared equal credit for the book and lyrics. The show opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 12 July 1993, and ran for 1,529 performances. In spite of the show's popularity and extensive run in London's West End, it lost money due to the sheer expense of the production.
In 1994, Sunset Boulevard became a successful Broadway show, opening with the largest advance in Broadway history, and winning seven Tony Awards that year. Even so, by its closing in 1997, "it had not recouped its reported $13 million investment."
In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a film version of "Cats", which was filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in London. David Mallet directed the film, and Gillian Lynne choreographed the film. The cast consisted of performers who had been in the show before, including Ken Page (Original Old Deuteronomy on Broadway) as Old Deuteronomy, Elaine Paige (Original Grizabella in London) and Sir John Mills as Gus: the Theatre Cat.
In 1998 Whistle Down the Wind made its debut, a musical written with lyrics supplied by rock legend Jim Steinman. Originally opening in Washington, Lloyd Webber was reportedly not happy with the casting or Harold Prince's production and the show was subsequently revised for a London staging directed by Gale Edwards, the production is probably most notable for the number-one hit from Boyzone "No Matter What" which left only the UK charts when the price of the CD single was changed to drop it out of the official top ten. His The Beautiful Game opened in London and has never been seen on Broadway. The show had a respectable run at The Cambridge Theatre in London. The show has been re-worked into a new musical, The Boys in the Photograph, which had its world première at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in April 2008.
2000s
Having achieved great popular success in musical theatre, Lloyd Webber was referred to by The New York Times in 2001 as "the most commercially successful composer in history."
On 16 September 2004, his production of The Woman in White opened at the Palace Theatre in London. It ran for 19 months and 500 performances. A revised production opened on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre on 17 November 2005. Garnering mixed reviews from critics, due in part to the frequent absences of the show's star Maria Friedman due to breast cancer treatment, it closed only a brief three months later on 19 February 2006.
Lloyd Webber produced a staging of The Sound of Music, which débuted November 2006. He made the controversial decision to choose an unknown to play leading lady Maria, who was found through the BBC's reality television show How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?, in which he was a judge. The winner of the show was Connie Fisher.
It was announced on 25 August 2006, on his personal website, that his next project would be The Master and Margarita (Lloyd Webber has stated that the project will most likely be an opera rather than a musical), however it was announced in late March 2007 that he had abandoned the project.
In September 2006, Lloyd Webber was named to be a recipient of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors with Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, Steven Spielberg, and Smokey Robinson. He was recognised for his outstanding contribution to American performing arts. He attended the ceremony on 3 December 2006; it aired on 26 December 2006. On 11 February 2007, Lloyd Webber was featured as a guest judge on the reality television show Grease: You're the One that I Want! The contestants all sang "The Phantom of the Opera".
Between April and June 2007, he appeared in BBC One's Any Dream Will Do!, which followed the same format as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?. Its aim was to find a new Joseph for his revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Lee Mead won the contest after quitting his part in the ensemble – and as understudy in The Phantom of the Opera – to compete for the role. Viewers' telephone voting during the series raised more than £500,000 for the BBC's annual Children in Need charity appeal, according to host Graham Norton on air during the final. On 1 July 2007, Lloyd Webber presented excerpts from his musicals as part of the Concert for Diana organised to celebrate the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The BBC Radio 2 broadcast a concert of music from the Lloyd-Webber musicals on 24 August 2007. Denise Van Outen introduced songs from Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, Tell Me on a Sunday, The Woman in White, Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, which Webber revived in 2006 at the London Palladium and 2002's Lloyd Webber-produced Bollywood-style musical Bombay Dreams by A. R. Rahman and Don Black.
In April 2008, Lloyd Webber reprised his role as judge, this time in the BBC musical talent show I'd Do Anything. The show followed a similar format to its Maria and Joseph predecessors, this time involving a search for an actress to play the role of Nancy in an upcoming West End production of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! The show also featured a search for three young actors to play and share the title character's role, but the show's main focus was on the search for Nancy. The role was won by Jodie Prenger despite Lloyd Webber's stated preference for one of the other contestants; the winners of the Oliver role were Harry Stott, Gwion Wyn-Jones and Laurence Jeffcoate. Also in April 2008. Lloyd Webber was featured on the U.S. talent show American Idol, acting as a mentor when the 6 finalists had to select one of Lloyd Webber's songs to perform for the judges that week.
Lloyd Webber accepted the challenge of managing the UK's entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Moscow. In early 2009 a series, called Eurovision: Your Country Needs You, was broadcast to find a performer for a song that he would compose for the competition. Jade Ewen won the right to represent Britain, winning with It's My Time, by Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren. At the contest, Lloyd Webber accompanied her on the piano during the performance. The United Kingdom finished 5th in the contest. The winner was Norway's Alexander Rybak with his world record composition "Fairytale".
On 8 October 2009, Lloyd Webber launched the musical Love Never Dies at a press conference held at Her Majesty's Theatre, where the original Phantom has been running since 1986. Also present were Sierra Boggess, who has been cast as Christine Daaé, and Ramin Karimloo, who portrayed Phantom, a role he most recently played in the West End.
2010s
Following the opening of Love Never Dies, Lloyd Webber again began a search for a new musical theatre performer in the BBC One series Over the Rainbow. He cast the winner, Danielle Hope, in the role of Dorothy and a dog to play Toto in his forthcoming stage production of The Wizard of Oz. He and lyricist and composer Tim Rice wrote a number of new songs for the production to supplement the songs from the film.
On 26 February 2010, he appeared on BBC's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross to promote Love Never Dies.
On 1 March 2011, The Wizard of Oz opened at The Palladium Theatre, starring Danielle Hope as Dorothy and Michael Crawford as the Wizard.
In 2012 Lloyd Webber fronted a new ITV primetime show Superstar which gave the UK public the chance to decide who would play the starring role of Jesus in an upcoming arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. The arena tour started in September 2012 and also starred comedian Tim Minchin as Judas Iscariot, former Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene and BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles as King Herod. Tickets for most venues went on sale on 18 May 2012.
Webber caused controversy with a series of comments about Eurovision in a Radio Times interview. He said: "I dont think there's any point in beating around the bush. I saw no black faces on the programme (Eurovision 2012). I was questioned by the press over Jade Ewen's race, and I think we would have placed second, but there is a problem when you go further east. If you're talking about Western Europe it's fine, but Ukraine, not so good." The EBU corrected Webber, telling him Ukraine's singer Gaitana was black, that year's winner Loreen for Sweden was of North African background and accompanied by a black backing dancer, and France's contestant Anggun was Indonesian. The contest organisers also told Webber that black singer Dave Benton won for Estonia in 2001. The EBU thoroughly denied racism in its show, and insisted it unites Europe for three nights in a year.
In 2013, Webber reunited with Christopher Hampton and Don Black on Stephen Ward the Musical.
Accusations of plagiarism
Lloyd Webber has been accused of plagiarism in his works. The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen commented that: "There are two sorts of stealing (in music) - taking something and doing nothing with it, or going to work on what you've stolen. The first is plagiarism. Andrew Lloyd Webber has yet to think up a single note; in fact, the poor guy's never invented one note by himself. That's rather poor".
However, Lloyd Webber's biographer, John Snelson, countered such accusations. He acknowledged a similarity between the Andante movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor and the Jesus Christ Superstar song "I Don't Know How to Love Him", but wrote that Lloyd Webber:
...brings a new dramatic tension to Mendelssohn's original melody through the confused emotions of Mary Magdalene. The opening theme may be Mendelssohn, but the rhythmic and harmonic treatment along with new lines of highly effective melodic development are Lloyd Webber's. The song works in its own right as its many performers and audiences can witness.
In interviews promoting Amused to Death, Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, claimed that Lloyd Webber had copied a short chromatic riff from the 1971 song "Echoes" for sections of The Phantom of the Opera, released in 1986; nevertheless, he decided he did not want to file a lawsuit. The songwriter Ray Repp also claimed that Lloyd Webber stole a different melody from his own song "Till You". Unlike Roger Waters, Ray Repp did decide to file a lawsuit, but the court ruled in Lloyd Webber's favour.
The Program Guide for the San Francisco Opera's performance (2009–2010 season) of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West states (p. 42):
"The climactic phrase in Dick Johnson'a aria, "Quello che tacete," bears a strong resemblance to a similar phrase in the Phantom's song, "Music of the Night," in Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera. Following the musical's success, the Puccini estate filed suit against Lloyd Webber, accusing him of plagiarism, and the suit was settled out of court."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber"
Monday, 21 April 2014
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."
Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.
Chekhov now assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by Nikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time. Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.
In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened; but he would not admit tuberculosis to his family and friends, confessing to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues." He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodation. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid per line a rate double Leykin's and allowed him three times the space. Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.
Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman, "You have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality.
Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and confessed, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising. Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."
That year, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe. On his return, he began the novella-length short story The Steppe, "something rather odd and much too original," eventually published in Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald). In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe, which has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", represented a significant advance for Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper.
In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November. Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality. Mikhail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's which has become known as "Chekhov's gun", noted by Ilia Gurliand from a conversation: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act."
The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolay from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life which he realises has been without purpose. Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolay's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov"
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."
Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.
Early writings
Chekhov now assumed responsibility for the whole family. To support them and to pay his tuition fees, he wrote daily short, humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life, many under pseudonyms such as "Antosha Chekhonte" (Антоша Чехонте) and "Man without a Spleen" (Человек без селезенки). His prodigious output gradually earned him a reputation as a satirical chronicler of Russian street life, and by 1882 he was writing for Oskolki (Fragments), owned by Nikolai Leykin, one of the leading publishers of the time. Chekhov's tone at this stage was harsher than that familiar from his mature fiction.
In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge. In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened; but he would not admit tuberculosis to his family and friends, confessing to Leykin, "I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues." He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodation. Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid per line a rate double Leykin's and allowed him three times the space. Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.
Before long, Chekhov was attracting literary as well as popular attention. The sixty-four-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated Russian writer of the day, wrote to Chekhov after reading his short story The Huntsman, "You have real talent—a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He went on to advise Chekhov to slow down, write less, and concentrate on literary quality.
Chekhov replied that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt" and confessed, "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." The admission may have done Chekhov a disservice, since early manuscripts reveal that he often wrote with extreme care, continually revising. Grigorovich's advice nevertheless inspired a more serious, artistic ambition in the twenty-six-year-old. In 1887, with a little string-pulling by Grigorovich, the short story collection At Dusk (V Sumerkakh) won Chekhov the coveted Pushkin Prize "for the best literary production distinguished by high artistic worth."
Turning points
That year, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe. On his return, he began the novella-length short story The Steppe, "something rather odd and much too original," eventually published in Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald). In a narrative which drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, his companions a priest and a merchant. The Steppe, which has been called a "dictionary of Chekhov's poetics", represented a significant advance for Chekhov, exhibiting much of the quality of his mature fiction and winning him publication in a literary journal rather than a newspaper.
In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November. Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening", and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality. Mikhail Chekhov considered Ivanov a key moment in his brother's intellectual development and literary career. From this period comes an observation of Chekhov's which has become known as "Chekhov's gun", noted by Ilia Gurliand from a conversation: "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act."
The death of Chekhov's brother Nikolay from tuberculosis in 1889 influenced A Dreary Story, finished that September, about a man who confronts the end of a life which he realises has been without purpose. Mikhail Chekhov, who recorded his brother's depression and restlessness after Nikolay's death, was researching prisons at the time as part of his law studies, and Anton Chekhov, in a search for purpose in his own life, himself soon became obsessed with the issue of prison reform.
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov"
Stella Adler
Stella Adler (February 10, 1901[1] – December 21, 1992) was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City (1949) and the of The Stella Adler Academy Acting in Los Angeles (1985) with long-time protégé Joanne Linville, who continues to teach and furthers Adler's legacy. Her grandson Tom Oppenheim now runs the school in New York, which produced alumni including Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Jenny Lumet, daughter of Sidney Lumet. Irene Gilbert, long-time protégé and close personal friend, founded the Stella Adler Academy of Acting and Theatre in Los Angeles, and was instrumental in bringing Stella Adler to the West Coast to teach on a permanent basis. The Los Angeles school continues to flourish as an acting studio and houses several theaters, alumni of the Stella Adler-Los Angeles school include Mark Ruffalo, Benicio Del Toro, Brion James, Salma Hayek, Clifton Collins Jr., and Sean Astin.
She began her acting career at the age of four in the play Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, as a part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. She grew up acting alongside her parents, often playing roles of boys and girls. Her work schedule allowed little time for schooling, but when possible, she studied at public schools and New York University. She made her London debut, at the age of 18, as Naomi in the play Elisa Ben Avia with her father's company, in which she appeared for a year before returning to New York. In London she met her first husband, Englishman Horace Eliashcheff; their brief marriage however ended in a divorce.
She made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922, as the Butterfly in the play The World We Live In, and also spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–1923, the renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only US tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances; this had a powerful and lasting impact on her career, as well as the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of the Moscow Art Theater—Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1931 she joined the Group Theatre, New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group theatre she worked in plays like Success Story by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets's Golden Boy and More to Give to People. Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the Method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski.
In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that the actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of Method acting.
In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There she acted in films for six years under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually she returned to New York to act, direct and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, New York City, before founding Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949. In the coming years, she taught Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolores del Río, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich and Warren Beatty, among others, the principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama. For many years, Adler led the undergraduate drama department at New York University, and became one of America's leading acting teachers.
Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information—how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated.
—Marlon Brando
Adler was Marlon Brando's first professional acting teacher.
In 1988, she published 'The Technique of Acting' (Bantam Books), with a foreword by Brando.
From 1926 until 1952, Adler appeared regularly on Broadway. Her later stage roles include the 1946 revival of 'He Who Gets Slapped' and an eccentric mother in the 1961 black comedy, 'Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad.' Among the plays she directed was a 1956 revival of the Paul Green-Kurt Weill antiwar musical 'Johnny Johnson'. Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career, by Edward Vilga. She appeared in only three films, Love on Toast (1937), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948).
Adler was the only American actor to study with Constantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski System (later developed by Strasberg into Method acting) made her leave the Group.
Adler once said: "Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role, is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don't want to do it."
Adler met with Stanislavski again later in his career and questioned him on Strasberg's interpretation. He told her that he had abandoned emotional memory (which had been Strasberg's dominant paradigm), but they both believed that the actor did not have what is required to play a variety roles already instilled inside them and that extensive research was needed to understand the experiences of characters who have different values originating from different cultures. For instance, if a character talks about horse riding, one needs to know something about horse riding as an actor, otherwise one will be faking. More importantly one must study the values of different people to understand what situations would have meant to people, that in the actor's own culture might mean nothing. Without this work she said an actor walks onto the stage "naked." This approach is one for which one of her students, Robert De Niro, became famous. She also trained actors sensory imagination to help make the characters' experiences more vivid (a commonality between her and Strasberg). Mastery of the physical and vocal aspects of acting, she believed, was necessary for the actor to command the stage: all body language should be carefully crafted and voices need to be clear and expressive. She often referred to this as an actor's "size" or "worthiness of the stage." Her biggest mantra was perhaps, "in your choices lies your talent," she would encourage actors to find the most grand character interpretation possible in a scene, another favorite phrase of hers regarding this was "don't be boring."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Adler"
Career
She began her acting career at the age of four in the play Broken Hearts at the Grand Street Theatre on the Lower East Side, as a part of her parents' Independent Yiddish Art Company. She grew up acting alongside her parents, often playing roles of boys and girls. Her work schedule allowed little time for schooling, but when possible, she studied at public schools and New York University. She made her London debut, at the age of 18, as Naomi in the play Elisa Ben Avia with her father's company, in which she appeared for a year before returning to New York. In London she met her first husband, Englishman Horace Eliashcheff; their brief marriage however ended in a divorce.
She made her English-language debut on Broadway in 1922, as the Butterfly in the play The World We Live In, and also spent a season in the vaudeville circuit. In 1922–1923, the renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski made his only US tour with his Moscow Art Theatre. Adler and many others saw these performances; this had a powerful and lasting impact on her career, as well as the 20th-century American theatre. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925; there she was introduced to Stanislavski's theories, from founders and Russian actor-teachers and former members of the Moscow Art Theater—Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1931 she joined the Group Theatre, New York, founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, through theater director and critic, Clurman, whom she later married in 1943. With Group theatre she worked in plays like Success Story by John Howard Lawson, two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets's Golden Boy and More to Give to People. Members of Group Theatre were leading interpreters of the Method acting technique based on the work and writings of Stanislavski.
In 1934, Adler went to Paris with Harold Clurman and studied intensively with Stanislavski for five weeks. During this period, she learned that Stanislavski had revised his theories, emphasizing that the actor should create by imagination rather than memory. Upon her return, she broke away from Strasberg on the fundamental aspects of Method acting.
In January 1937, Adler moved to Hollywood. There she acted in films for six years under the name Stella Ardler, occasionally returning to the Group Theater until it dissolved in 1941. Eventually she returned to New York to act, direct and teach, the latter first at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, New York City, before founding Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949. In the coming years, she taught Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolores del Río, Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Manu Tupou, Harvey Keitel, Melanie Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich and Warren Beatty, among others, the principles of characterization and script analysis. She also taught at the New School, and the Yale School of Drama. For many years, Adler led the undergraduate drama department at New York University, and became one of America's leading acting teachers.
Stella Adler was much more than a teacher of acting. Through her work she imparts the most valuable kind of information—how to discover the nature of our own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She never lent herself to vulgar exploitations, as some other well-known so-called "methods" of acting have done. As a result, her contributions to the theatrical culture have remained largely unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated.
—Marlon Brando
Adler was Marlon Brando's first professional acting teacher.
In 1988, she published 'The Technique of Acting' (Bantam Books), with a foreword by Brando.
From 1926 until 1952, Adler appeared regularly on Broadway. Her later stage roles include the 1946 revival of 'He Who Gets Slapped' and an eccentric mother in the 1961 black comedy, 'Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad.' Among the plays she directed was a 1956 revival of the Paul Green-Kurt Weill antiwar musical 'Johnny Johnson'. Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career, by Edward Vilga. She appeared in only three films, Love on Toast (1937), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), and My Girl Tisa (1948).
Stanislavski and The Method
Adler was the only American actor to study with Constantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski System (later developed by Strasberg into Method acting) made her leave the Group.
Adler once said: "Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role, is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don't want to do it."
Adler met with Stanislavski again later in his career and questioned him on Strasberg's interpretation. He told her that he had abandoned emotional memory (which had been Strasberg's dominant paradigm), but they both believed that the actor did not have what is required to play a variety roles already instilled inside them and that extensive research was needed to understand the experiences of characters who have different values originating from different cultures. For instance, if a character talks about horse riding, one needs to know something about horse riding as an actor, otherwise one will be faking. More importantly one must study the values of different people to understand what situations would have meant to people, that in the actor's own culture might mean nothing. Without this work she said an actor walks onto the stage "naked." This approach is one for which one of her students, Robert De Niro, became famous. She also trained actors sensory imagination to help make the characters' experiences more vivid (a commonality between her and Strasberg). Mastery of the physical and vocal aspects of acting, she believed, was necessary for the actor to command the stage: all body language should be carefully crafted and voices need to be clear and expressive. She often referred to this as an actor's "size" or "worthiness of the stage." Her biggest mantra was perhaps, "in your choices lies your talent," she would encourage actors to find the most grand character interpretation possible in a scene, another favorite phrase of hers regarding this was "don't be boring."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Adler"
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg (born Israel Strassberg; November 17, 1901 – February 17, 1982) was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school". In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood to teach the work he pioneered.
He is considered the "father of method acting in America," according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies". From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.
Former student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in East of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. As a student, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of the theater [and] the best thing that can happen to an actor". Playwright Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Desire, said of Strasberg's actors, "They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life." Directors like Sidney Lumet, a former student, have intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg's "Method".
Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them 'permanent.'" Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors. As an actor, Strasberg is probably best known for his role as gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II (1974), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His personal papers, including photos, are archived at the Library of Congress.
In describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two areas of discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private classes were improvisation and affective memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character". Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his approach in this way:
"The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage."
According to film critic/author Mel Gussow, Strasberg required that an actor, when preparing for a role, delve not only into the character's life in the play, but also, "[F]ar more importantly, into the character's life before the curtain rises. In rehearsal, the character's prehistory, perhaps going back to childhood, is discussed and even acted out. The play became the climax of the character's existence."
He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the center of the camp's activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything in camp revolved around him. Preparing to direct the play that was to open the coming season, as he had the three plays of the season before, he would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to their artistic training. He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, made them 'permanent'. He did this not only by his superior knowledge but by the threat of his anger... [H]e enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral would. Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity, and perhaps the only way they could be held together to do their work properly was by the threat of an authority they respected. And feared. No one questioned his dominance – he spoke holy writ – his leading role in that summer's activities, and his right to all power. To win his favor became everyone's goal. His explosions of temper maintained the discipline of this camp of high-strung people. I came to believe that without their fear of this man, the Group would fly apart, everyone going in different directions instead of to where he was pointing.... I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him. Lee was making an artistic revolution and knew it. An organization such as the Group – then in its second year, which is to say still beginning, still being shaped – lives only by the will of a fanatic and the drive with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He'd studied other revolutions, political and artistic. He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance.[7]:59
At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor's arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are re-experiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art.... Lee taught his actors to launch their work on every scene by taking a minute to remember the details surrounding the emotional experience in their lives that would correspond to the emotion of the scene they were about to play. 'Take a minute!' became the watchword of that summer, the phrase heard most often, just as this particular kind of inner concentration became the trademark of Lee's own work when he directed a production. His actors often appeared to be in a state of self-hypnosis.[7]:61
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strasberg"
He is considered the "father of method acting in America," according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies". From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.
Former student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in East of Eden (1955), for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. As a student, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was "the greatest school of the theater [and] the best thing that can happen to an actor". Playwright Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Desire, said of Strasberg's actors, "They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life." Directors like Sidney Lumet, a former student, have intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg's "Method".
Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, "He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them 'permanent.'" Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors. As an actor, Strasberg is probably best known for his role as gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II (1974), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His personal papers, including photos, are archived at the Library of Congress.
Teaching methods and philosophy
In describing his teaching philosophy, Strasberg wrote, "The two areas of discovery that were of primary importance in my work at the Actors Studio and in my private classes were improvisation and affective memory. It is finally by using these techniques that the actor can express the appropriate emotions demanded of the character". Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his approach in this way:
"The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage."
According to film critic/author Mel Gussow, Strasberg required that an actor, when preparing for a role, delve not only into the character's life in the play, but also, "[F]ar more importantly, into the character's life before the curtain rises. In rehearsal, the character's prehistory, perhaps going back to childhood, is discussed and even acted out. The play became the climax of the character's existence."
Elia Kazan as student
In Elia Kazan's autobiography, the Academy Award-winning director wrote about his earliest memories of Strasberg as teacher:He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the center of the camp's activities that summer, the core of the vortex. Everything in camp revolved around him. Preparing to direct the play that was to open the coming season, as he had the three plays of the season before, he would also give the basic instruction in acting, laying down the principles of the art by which the Group worked, the guides to their artistic training. He was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, made them 'permanent'. He did this not only by his superior knowledge but by the threat of his anger... [H]e enjoyed his eminence just as the admiral would. Actors are as self-favoring as the rest of humanity, and perhaps the only way they could be held together to do their work properly was by the threat of an authority they respected. And feared. No one questioned his dominance – he spoke holy writ – his leading role in that summer's activities, and his right to all power. To win his favor became everyone's goal. His explosions of temper maintained the discipline of this camp of high-strung people. I came to believe that without their fear of this man, the Group would fly apart, everyone going in different directions instead of to where he was pointing.... I was afraid of him too. Even as I admired him. Lee was making an artistic revolution and knew it. An organization such as the Group – then in its second year, which is to say still beginning, still being shaped – lives only by the will of a fanatic and the drive with which he propels his vision. He has to be unswerving, uncompromising, and unadjustable. Lee knew this. He'd studied other revolutions, political and artistic. He knew what was needed, and he was fired up by his mission and its importance.[7]:59
Classroom settings
Kazan described his classes:At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor's arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are re-experiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art.... Lee taught his actors to launch their work on every scene by taking a minute to remember the details surrounding the emotional experience in their lives that would correspond to the emotion of the scene they were about to play. 'Take a minute!' became the watchword of that summer, the phrase heard most often, just as this particular kind of inner concentration became the trademark of Lee's own work when he directed a production. His actors often appeared to be in a state of self-hypnosis.[7]:61
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strasberg"
Sunday, 20 April 2014
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño, usually referred as Pedro Calderón de la Barca (17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681), was a dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age. During certain periods of his life he was also a soldier and a Roman Catholic priest. Born when the Spanish Golden Age theatre was being defined by Lope de Vega, he developed it further, his work being regarded as the culmination of the Spanish Baroque theatre. As such, he is regarded as one of Spain's foremost dramatists and one of the finest playwrights of world literature.
Calderón initiated what has been called the second cycle of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Whereas his predecessor, Lope de Vega, pioneered the dramatic forms and genres of Spanish Golden Age theatre, Calderón polished and perfected them. Whereas Lope's strength lay in the sponteneity and naturalness of his work, Calderón's strength lay in his capacity for poetic beauty, dramatic structure and philosophical depth. Calderón was a perfectionist who often revisited and reworked his plays, even long after they were first performed. This perfectionism was not just limited to his own work: several of his plays rework existing plays or scenes by other dramatists, improving their depth, complexity, and unity. Calderón excelled above all others in the genre of the "auto sacramental", in which he showed a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to giving new dramatic forms to a given set of theological and philosophical constructs. Calderón wrote 120 "comedias", 80 "autos sacramentales" and 20 short comedic works called "entremeses".
As Goethe notes, Calderón tended to write his plays taking special care of their dramatic structure. He therefore usually reduced the number of scenes in his plays as compared to those of Lope de Vega, so as to avoid any superfluity and present only those scenes essential to the play, also reducing the number of different metres in his plays for the sake of gaining a greater stylistic uniformity. Although his poetry and plays leaned towards culteranismo, he usually reduced the level and obscurity of that style by avoiding metaphors and references away from those that uneducated viewers could understand. However, he had a liking for symbolism, for example making a fall from a horse a metaphor of a fall into disgrace, the fall representing dishonour; the use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of the play as a way of making false predictions about the following to occur, symbolizing the utter uncertainty of future. In addition, probably influenced by Cervantes, Calderón realized that any play was but fiction, and that the structure of the baroque play was entirely artificial. He therefore sometimes makes use of meta-theatrical techniques such as making his characters read in a jocose manner the clichés the author is using, and they are thus forced to follow. Some of the most common themes of his plays were heavily influenced by his Jesuit education. For example, as a reader of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, he liked to confront reason against the passions, intellect against instinct, or understanding against will. In common with many writers from the Spanish Golden Age, his plays usually show his vital pessimism, that is only softened by his rationalism and his faith in God; the anguish and distress usually found his oeuvre is better exemplified in one of his most famous plays, La Vida es sueño, Life is a Dream, in which Segismundo claims:
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño.
¡Que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son!
Translation:
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are only dreams.
Indeed, his themes tended to be complex and philosophical, and express complicated states of mind in a manner that few playwrights have been able to manage. Like Baltasar Gracián, Calderón favoured only the deepest human feelings and dilemmas.
Since Calderón's plays were usually represented at the court of the King of Spain, he had access to the most modern techniques regarding scenography. He collaborated with Cosme Lotti in developing complex scenographies that were integrated in some of his plays, specially his most religious-themed ones such as the Autos Sacramentales, becoming extremely complex allegories of moral, philosophical and religious concepts.
Although his fame dwindled during the 18th century, he was rediscovered in the early 19th century by the German Romantics. Translations of August Wilhelm Schlegel reinvigorated interest in the playwright, who, alongside Shakespeare, subsequently became a banner figure for the German Romantic movement. In subsequent decades, Calderón's work was translated into German numerous times, most notably by Johann Dietrich Gries and Joseph von Eichendorff, and found significant reception on the German and Austrian stages under the direction of Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Joseph Schreyvogel. Later significant German adaptations include Hugo von Hofmannsthal's versions of La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo.
Although best known abroad as the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak produced acclaimed Russian translations of Calderón's plays during the late 1950s. According to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya,
In working on Calderón he received help from Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubumov, a shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak:
"I took finished bits of the translation with me to Moscow, read them to Liubimov at Potapov Street, and then went back to Peredelkino, where I would tactfully ask [Boris Leonidovich] to change passages which, in Liubimov's view departed too far from the original. Very soon after the 'scandal' was over, [Boris Leonidovich] received a first payment for the work on Calderón."
Twentieth-century Calderón reception suffered significantly under the influence of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, but a revival of interest in Calderón scholarship can be largely attributed to British reception, namely through the works of A.A. Parker, A.E. Sloman and more recently Bruce Wardropper.
Although not well known to the current English speaking world, Calderón's plays were first adapted into English during the 17th century. For instance, Samuel Pepys recorded attending to some plays during 1667 which were free translations of some of Calderón's. Percy Bysshe Shelley translated a substantial portion of El Mágico prodigioso. Some of Calderón's works have been translated into English, notably by Denis Florence MacCarthy, Edward Fitzgerald, Roy Campbell, Edwin Honig, Kenneth Muir & Ann L. Mackenzie, Adrian Mitchell, and Gwynne Edwards.
Calderón de la Barca appears in the 1998 novel The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Perez-Reverte, which takes up the assumption that he served in the Spanish Army at Flanders and depicts him during the sack of Oudkerk by Spanish troops, helping the local librarian save books from the library in the burning Town Hall. Latin American author Giannina Braschi based her dramatic novel "United States of Banana" (2011) on Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), recasting the tragic hero Segismundo in 21st century New York City, where his father the King of the United States of Banana locks him in dungeon of the Statue of Liberty for the crime of having been born.
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Calder%C3%B3n_de_la_Barca"
Style
As Goethe notes, Calderón tended to write his plays taking special care of their dramatic structure. He therefore usually reduced the number of scenes in his plays as compared to those of Lope de Vega, so as to avoid any superfluity and present only those scenes essential to the play, also reducing the number of different metres in his plays for the sake of gaining a greater stylistic uniformity. Although his poetry and plays leaned towards culteranismo, he usually reduced the level and obscurity of that style by avoiding metaphors and references away from those that uneducated viewers could understand. However, he had a liking for symbolism, for example making a fall from a horse a metaphor of a fall into disgrace, the fall representing dishonour; the use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of the play as a way of making false predictions about the following to occur, symbolizing the utter uncertainty of future. In addition, probably influenced by Cervantes, Calderón realized that any play was but fiction, and that the structure of the baroque play was entirely artificial. He therefore sometimes makes use of meta-theatrical techniques such as making his characters read in a jocose manner the clichés the author is using, and they are thus forced to follow. Some of the most common themes of his plays were heavily influenced by his Jesuit education. For example, as a reader of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, he liked to confront reason against the passions, intellect against instinct, or understanding against will. In common with many writers from the Spanish Golden Age, his plays usually show his vital pessimism, that is only softened by his rationalism and his faith in God; the anguish and distress usually found his oeuvre is better exemplified in one of his most famous plays, La Vida es sueño, Life is a Dream, in which Segismundo claims:
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño.
¡Que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son!
Translation:
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is small;
For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are only dreams.
Indeed, his themes tended to be complex and philosophical, and express complicated states of mind in a manner that few playwrights have been able to manage. Like Baltasar Gracián, Calderón favoured only the deepest human feelings and dilemmas.
Since Calderón's plays were usually represented at the court of the King of Spain, he had access to the most modern techniques regarding scenography. He collaborated with Cosme Lotti in developing complex scenographies that were integrated in some of his plays, specially his most religious-themed ones such as the Autos Sacramentales, becoming extremely complex allegories of moral, philosophical and religious concepts.
Reception
Although best known abroad as the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak produced acclaimed Russian translations of Calderón's plays during the late 1950s. According to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya,
In working on Calderón he received help from Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubumov, a shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak:
"I took finished bits of the translation with me to Moscow, read them to Liubimov at Potapov Street, and then went back to Peredelkino, where I would tactfully ask [Boris Leonidovich] to change passages which, in Liubimov's view departed too far from the original. Very soon after the 'scandal' was over, [Boris Leonidovich] received a first payment for the work on Calderón."
Twentieth-century Calderón reception suffered significantly under the influence of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, but a revival of interest in Calderón scholarship can be largely attributed to British reception, namely through the works of A.A. Parker, A.E. Sloman and more recently Bruce Wardropper.
English
Although not well known to the current English speaking world, Calderón's plays were first adapted into English during the 17th century. For instance, Samuel Pepys recorded attending to some plays during 1667 which were free translations of some of Calderón's. Percy Bysshe Shelley translated a substantial portion of El Mágico prodigioso. Some of Calderón's works have been translated into English, notably by Denis Florence MacCarthy, Edward Fitzgerald, Roy Campbell, Edwin Honig, Kenneth Muir & Ann L. Mackenzie, Adrian Mitchell, and Gwynne Edwards.
In modern literature
Calderón de la Barca appears in the 1998 novel The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Perez-Reverte, which takes up the assumption that he served in the Spanish Army at Flanders and depicts him during the sack of Oudkerk by Spanish troops, helping the local librarian save books from the library in the burning Town Hall. Latin American author Giannina Braschi based her dramatic novel "United States of Banana" (2011) on Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), recasting the tragic hero Segismundo in 21st century New York City, where his father the King of the United States of Banana locks him in dungeon of the Statue of Liberty for the crime of having been born.
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Calder%C3%B3n_de_la_Barca"
Constantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski, 17 January [O.S. 5 January] 1863 – 7 August 1938) was a Russian actor and theatre director. The eponymous Stanislavski method, or simply "method acting", has had a pervasive influence, especially in the period after World War II.
Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour requiring dedication, discipline and integrity. Throughout his life, he subjected his own acting to a process of rigorous artistic self-analysis and reflection. His development of a theorized praxis—in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development—identifies him as one of the great modern theatre practitioners.
Stanislavski's work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the Soviet Union as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States. It draws on a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism,symbolism and Meyerhold's constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behavioural psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiologyand the aesthetics of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He described his approach as 'spiritual Realism'.
Stanislavski wrote several works, including An Actor Prepares, An Actor's Work on a Role, and his autobiography, My Life in Art.
Early influences
Instead, Stanislavski devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of psychological realism in Russia. Psychological realism had been developed here by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin.
Stanislavski's system
Stanislavski's 'system' is a systematic approach to training actors. Areas of study include concentration, voice, physical skills, emotion memory, observation, and dramatic analysis. Stanislavski's goal was to find a universally applicable approach that could be of service to all actors. Yet he said of his system: "Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you."
Many actors routinely identify his system with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski's multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in'.
Emotion memory
Stanislavski's 'system' focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to "experience the part" during performance. Stanislavski hoped that the 'system' could be applied to all forms of drama, including melodrama, vaudeville, and opera. He organised a series of theatre studios in which young actors were trained in his 'system.' At the First Studio, actors were instructed to use their own memories in order to express emotion.Stanislavski soon observed that some of the actors using or abusing this technique were given to hysteria. He began to search for more reliable means to access emotion, eventually emphasizing the actor's use of imagination and belief in the given circumstances of the text rather than her/his private and often painful memories.
The Method of Physical Actions
In the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means. While in its very earliest stages his 'system' focused on creating truthful emotions and embodying them, he later worked on the Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 1930s. Its focus was on physical actions as a means to access truthful emotion, and involved improvisation. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious.
Legacy
Stanislavski had different pupils during each of the phases of discovering and experimenting with his 'system' of acting. Two of his former students, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925. One of their students, Lee Strasberg, went on to co-found the Group Theatre (1931–1940) with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, which was the first American acting company to put Stanislavski's initial discoveries into practice. Clurman and Strasberg had a profound influence on American acting, both on stage and film, as did Stella Adler, who was also part of the Group Theatre and who had studied briefly with Stanislavsky and quarreled with Strasberg's approach to the work. Sanford Meisner, another Group member, joined with Adler in opposing Strasberg's approach. This conflict was the partial cause of the Group Theatre's dissolution. After the Group broke up, Strasberg, Adler and Meisner each went on to found their own acting studios which trained many of the most prominent actors in American theater and film.
Lord Laurence Olivier wrote that Stanislavski's My Life in Art was a source of great enlightenment" when he was a young actor.
Sir John Gielgud said, "This director found time to explain a thousand things that have always troubled actors and fascinated students." Gielgud is also quoted as saying, "Stanislavski's now famous book is a contribution to the Theatre and its students all over the world."
Adapted from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Stanislavski"
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