Shakespeare was not a full-time writer without other responsibilities, like O’Neill or Williams. But what might look like a distraction for such authors—acting in his own and other people’s plays, coaching fellow players, helping manage the ownership of the troupe’s resources (including its two theaters, the Globe and Blackfriars)—was a strength for Shakespeare, since it made him a day-by-day observer of what the troupe could accomplish, actor by actor. [...]
'According to Pacini,' Julian Budden writes in The Operas of Verdi, 'it was the custom at the San Carlo theatre, Naples, for the composer to turn the pages for the leading cello and double bass players on opening nights.' The composer had to change his score to fit new voices if there were substitutions caused by illness or some other accident. In subsequent performances, he was expected to take out or put in arias for the different houses, transposing keys, changing orchestration. He was not a man of the study but of the theater.
Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater.
posted by shakespeherian
on Nov 18, 2011 -
48 comments
"I've been called over the top," Steinman says. "How silly. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side."
James Richard Steinman is best known for
his collaborations with artists such as Meatloaf (
Paradise by the Dashboard Light,) and Bonnie Tyler
Total Eclipse of the Heart. His songs have been covered by artists such as
Barbara Streisand(
Left in the Dark - here's Steinman's original.)
Barry Manilow (
Read 'Em and Weep, here performed by Meatloaf)
Air Supply (
Demo with Rory Dodd on vocals) And of course, many of us have seen the “literal versions of his videos for
Making Love out of Nothing At All, I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) Total Eclipse of the Heart, inspired by his flamboyant, theatrical style,
which does lend itself to parody.
But of course, there is much, much more.
[more inside]
posted by louche mustachio
on Oct 14, 2011 -
90 comments
Glengarry Glen Ross endures mainly as a spectacular display of verbal warfare and alpha-male gamesmanship. There’s a musical quality to it, with a great composer and a great chorus hitting the complicated runs of broken dialogue and solos that weave into profane poetry and nuggets of philosophical wisdom. Perhaps the greatest sign of the movie’s success, owed equally to Mamet’s script and this cast, is that it does a great sales job in itself, convincing us that there’s nobility to men who lie for a living — a bill of goods we’re all too happy to buy. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Sep 29, 2011 -
67 comments
Finnish YouTube user
Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts:
Broken Blossoms (
1919),
Aelita (
1924),
The Gipsy Charmer (
1929),
The Tragedy of Elina (
1938),
The Activists (
1939),
The Wooden Pauper's Bride (
1944), and
Sampo (
1959), which is based on the epic poem
The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though
Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and
Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers").
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 30, 2011 -
12 comments
Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
The other places are like kindergartens compared with this. It smells so incredibly evil! I didn't think such a place existed except in my own imagination. It has a ghastly familiarity like a half-remembered dream. *Anything* could happen here... any moment... Pauline Kael called it "hilariously, awesomely terrible". Others consider it "
a forgotten gem of a film that set the gold standard for noir films to come".
It was Josef von Sternberg's last major film -
The Shanghai Gesture (1941).
(parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 18, 2011 -
7 comments
History and mystery wonderfully blended. Although doubtless well-known to UK Mefites, I was only recently directed to this marvelous and engaging TV series featuring Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle. It's a refreshing change from American fare, entirely adult, with crisp dialogue and meticulous attention to detail and historic accuracy. Speaking as a Yank weary of plasticity, it's also wonderful to see actors with real faces. The series can be seen on Youtube in pieces that can be viewed fairly seamlessly: Series One:
The German Woman,
The White Feather,
Lesson in Murder,
Eagle Day. Series Two:
Fifty Ships,
Among the Few,
War Games,
The Funk Hole. Series Three:
The French Drop,
Enemy Fire,
They Fought in the Fields,
War of Nerves. Series Four:
Invasion,
Bad Blood. Series Five:
Bleak Midwinter,
Casualties of War. Series Six:
Plan of Attack,
Broken Souls,
All Clear.
[more inside]
posted by kinnakeet
on Sep 19, 2010 -
25 comments
Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama by Melanie Gilligan (of
Crisis in the Credit System) set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. (
via)
posted by anotherpanacea
on May 26, 2010 -
3 comments
TV serials, says Richard Beck, self-consciously set out from the very beginning to get us to take them seriously. From
Hill Street Blues to
The West Wing to
The Sopranos and
The Wire,
how the television series convinced us that it was art — and now, why
Lost's achievement of success via casual genre mixing and narrative derangement might signal that there's no future creative ground left within the old limits of serial drama.
posted by hat
on May 24, 2010 -
120 comments
"You're in love with Dr. Miracles!" "No, I'm in love with saving lives!"
Dr. Miracles saves former President George Bush, Starbucks and Santa Claus by administering highly unorthodox medical treatments (NSFW)
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Dec 19, 2009 -
16 comments
Old-time radio (often abbreviated as "OTR," also known as the Golden Age of Radio) refers to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the dominant home entertainment medium in the 1950s, with
some programs continuing
into the early 1960s. The origin of radio dramas in the United States is hard to pin down, but
there is evidence of a remote broadcast of a play in 1914 at
Normal College (now California State University at San José), and the first serial radio drama was
an adaptation of a play by Eugene Walter, entitled "The Wolf," which aired in September 1922. Given the age of the programs and the fact that
home reel-to-reel recording started in the 1950s (followed by Philips "compact cassettes" in 1963), it might be surprising that quite a few of
these old shows have survived. Thanks in part to original radio station-sourced recordings made on
aluminum discs, acetates, and glass recordings and other unnamed sources, many radio dramas and newscasts from decades past are
available online, and more are being digitized and restored to this day.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Aug 25, 2009 -
53 comments
Winner of an Emmy for best dramatic series in 1988, thirtysomething (ABC, 1987-1991) represented a new kind of hour-long drama, a series which focused on the domestic and professional lives of a group of young urban professionals-- a socio-economic category of increasing interest to the television industry. The series attracted a cult audience of viewers who strongly identified with one or more of its eight central characters, a circle of friends living in Philadelphia. And its stylistic and story-line innovations led critics to respect it for being "as close to the level of an art form as weekly television ever gets," as the New York Times put it. -
Museum of Broacast Communications [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Jun 9, 2009 -
75 comments
Three years after the failure of his recklessly ambitious Marxist epic
1900, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to directing with
La Luna - a story of opera and
incest featuring a Golden Globe-nominated performance by Jill Clayburgh, then at the height of her late 70s fame. [Also appearing in small roles were Fred Gwynne and an up-and-coming Roberto Benigni.] Writing in The New York Times,
Vincent Canby described it as "one of the most sublimely foolish movies ever made by a director of Mr. Bertolucci's acknowledged talents."
Roger Ebert wrote, "Bertolucci has sprung his gourd this time."
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on May 30, 2009 -
4 comments
Theatre of the New Ear. Two radio plays: one by Charlie Kaufman, the other by the Coen Brothers, recorded live and starring Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep.
[more inside]
posted by jack_mo
on Nov 20, 2008 -
18 comments
Seventy years ago today was the original broadcast of "The War of the Worlds". Listen to it, uninterrupted,
here. The program reportedly caused a mass panic across much of the Northeast.
[more inside]
posted by backseatpilot
on Oct 30, 2008 -
13 comments
Are you simply not getting enough drama in your life? Do you often get the urge to listen to other peoples relationship problems? Do you like to judge random people and find Relationshipfilter to be insufficient? Well, now there's
SideTaker ("Let The World Decide Who's At Fault"), a site where couples give their sides of an issue and let others decide who's
right or wrong.
Via.
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Sep 7, 2008 -
41 comments
Darker Projects has a bunch of original audio dramas in the sci-fi, horror, and suspense vein. Think of it as your local community audio-only theatre, or not-actually-old-timey old-time radio.
[more inside]
posted by Wolfdog
on Jun 1, 2008 -
9 comments
In 1974 - or 1976, depending who you ask -
Armistead Maupin began writing "an extended love letter to a magical San Francisco” in the form of a serialized, fictional drama published originally in the Pacific Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, originally called
"The Serial" which then became collectively known as
Tales of The City.
It is a suprisingly beautiful, deep, emotional, cosmopolitan and
lasting tale about life in San Francisco in the turbulent, heady days of the 1970s and 1980s.
Widely credited with and cherished for helping spread a little of the openess, tolerance and acceptance that San Francisco is now famous for. It then became a series of books -
Tales of the City,
More Tales of the City,
Further Tales of the City,
Babycakes,
Significant Others,
Sure of You - and lastly, the spin-off tale of
Michael Tolliver Lives. Almost exactly twenty years after first publishing, it then became
an excellent miniseries from the United Kingdom's Channel 4, which
aired in the United States on PBS, but not without
protest or limitations.
[more inside]
posted by loquacious
on May 4, 2008 -
39 comments
American audiences remember
Akira Kurosawa as the genius of the samurai epic, a past master who used the form both to revise and revive Western classics - Shakespeare with
Ran and
Throne of Blood, Dostoevsky with
Red Beard and
The Idiot, Gorky with
The Lower Depths - and to give splendid and ultimately immortal life to new archetypes, as in
The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. But Kurosawa also made films of his own time. His
masterpiece, in fact, was the quiet story of a gray Japanese bureaucrat dying in post-war Tokyo, and of his attempt to do something of lasting good before he leaves. The film is
Ikiru ("To Live"; 1952).
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jan 29, 2008 -
46 comments
During the latter half of the twentieth century, Liverpool writers made an enormous contribution to television drama. Writers like
Willy Russell and
Jimmy McGovern have been hugely influential. But the daddy of them all was unarguably
Alan Bleasdale, whose television dramas dominated our screens during the latter half of the 20th century in a manner that was unmatched by anybody besides the late
Dennis Potter.
[more inside]
posted by PeterMcDermott
on Dec 14, 2007 -
30 comments
