Vitro Nasu

Guardian Obit – RIP Peter Brook

(English theatre and film director Peter Brook was the first person to win the International Ibsen Award, in 2008.)

Stephen Sondheim, Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin in rehearsal for Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim’s best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). He was also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).

A must see – on youtube James Lipton interviewed Stephen Sondheim

BBC obit see photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Stephen Sondheim (Also Judy Dench video of singing his song)

The Stephen Sondheim cameo you didn’t realize was in Tick, Tick…Boom

Stephen Sondheim’s Voice End of Tick Tick Boom

“When I showed him the finished film, he said, ‘You treated me gently and royally, for which I’m grateful,'” says Miranda. “And then he wrote me and said, ‘But the last phone message to Jon, the language feels a little trite. I don’t feel like I would ever really say that. Can I rewrite it?’ I was like, ‘Gosh, a rewrite from Stephen Sondheim — do I accept this?'”
There was only one problem — Whitford had already wrapped his work on the project and was unavailable to re-record it. Sondheim offered to record the new version for Miranda, and it’s his voice that audiences can hear in the final cut.
“It makes me weep to even think about,” gushes Miranda. “Because he was such a mentor to Jon and generations of songwriters. But yes, he rewrote that message and recorded it himself and just sent it to me.”
He’s not good, he’s not nice, he’s Stephen Sondheim.

Listen to 22 best “I am still here

Nobel lecture performed by Mark Rylance – 2018

Art, Truth and Politics: Harold Pinter’s legendary Nobel lecture performed by Mark Rylance
By Robin Beste

And how right he was.
As well as in their professional lives, Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter were linked by their political activism, particularly in their opposition to injustice and war. Unsurprisingly, this led both to a close involvement with the Stop the War movement (STW), which was founded nearly two decades ago in response to the war in Afghanistan, and is one of the most significant mass movements in British history.

Harold Pinter quotes

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.
Harold Pinter

Julian Sands
via
Julian Sands, Harold Pinter the pregnant pause extended

In his one-man show “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” which he performs tonight at the Whittier College Writers Festival, the 55 year-old Brit reveals Pinter’s lesser known side—his surprising warmth and tenderness, as evidenced in his poetry, prose, letters, and the recollections and anecdotes of friends, including Sands himself. John Malkovich, with whom Sands previously worked in The Killing Fields, directs.

It is the dead of night,

The long dead look out towards
The new dead
Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat
As the dead embrace
Those who are long dead
And those of the new dead
Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss
As they meet again
For the first and last time

Harold Pinter, 2002
(Born: October 10, 1930, Hackney, London, United Kingdom)

Multiple Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally dies at 81

Wiki

via

Terrence McNally

His plays and musicals explored how people connect — or fail to. With wit and thoughtfulness, he tackled the strains in families, war, and relationships and probed the spark and costs of creativity. He was an openly gay writer who wrote about homophobia, love and AIDS.

“I like to work with people who are a lot more talented and smarter than me, who make fewer mistakes than I do, and who can call me out when I do something lazy,” he told LA Stage Times in 2013. “A lot of people stop

Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny

10 favorite books
(Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette is in the list)

(Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller: The Cast of “Beyond the Fringe)
BBC obit

Jonathan Miller, director and humorist, dies at 85

Jonathan Miller and The Kinds of Genius

(Jonathan Miller directs Mikado)

Clifford Odets collected Paul Klee – see more from here.
Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963)[1] was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director.
wiki

Clifford and Luis

Marilyn and Clifford Odets

One of Marilyn Monroe’s strongest early film roles was as Peggy, the feisty cannery worker in Clash by Night (1952), based on a play by Clifford Odets.

Marilyn knew Odets quite well and later played Lorna Moon in a scene from his most famous play, Golden Boy, at the Actor’s Studio during the late 1950s. She later considered starring in Odets’ screenplay, The Story on Page One (1959), but that role went to Rita Hayworth, and was directed by Odets himself.

Always competitive with Miller, Odets took a rather dim view of The Misfits (1960), Monroe’s last completed film, which Miller wrote and John Huston directed.

Odets was the leading New York playwright of the 1930s and 40s, and his plays focussed on social injustice and the plight of the ‘little man’. He was also involved in the formation of the Group Theatre alongside Lee Strasberg.

Unlike Arthur Miller, the playwright who ultimately eclipsed him, Odets chose to ‘name names’ in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials of the early 1950s, a decision he would bitterly regret. He died in 1963.

In his essay on Monroe in the book, Who the Hell’s in It, director Peter Bogdanovich recalled, ‘Clifford told me that Marilyn Monroe used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, “Well, they didn’t sneer at her.’”

Soon after Monroe’s death, Odets wrote, ‘One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe’s soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise. If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.’

One of Odets’ later plays, The Country Girl (filmed in 1954 with Grace Kelly) is currently being revived in London. Walt Odets has spoken to the Jewish Chronicle about his famous father and his memories, and mentioned, rather unfavourably, the marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe:

Photos of Marilyn from Clash by Night on FB

Sweet Smell of Success (screenplay by Clifford Odets, soundtrack by Chico Hamilton, directed by Alexander Mackendrick)

Beth Philips is writing a bio of Clifford Odets.

(Photo via)

Arthur Mitchell passed away at 84.

Dancer broke barriers for African Americans in the 1950s in leading roles with the New York City Ballet

George Balanchine with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell working on ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ in 1968.
Photo by Martha Swope from the collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
via

Balanchine archive

George Balanchine and Arhtur Mitchell

Mitchell shares interesting stories about Balanchine. (youtube) or why Pad de deux was so controversial (youtube)

Arthur Mitchell is an African-American dancer and choreographer who created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem.
In 1955 Mitchell made his debut as the first African American with the New York City Ballet
Mitchell was the only African-American dancer with the NY City Ballet until 1970. Choreographer and director of the NYCB George Balanchine created the pas de deux in Agon especially for Mitchell and the white ballerina Diana Adams. Although Mitchell danced this role with white partners throughout the world, he could not perform it on commercial television in the United States before 1965, because states in the South refused to carry it.

Arthur Mitchell

Slim dragon-fly
too rapid for the eye
to cage,

contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility

reveal
and veil
a peacock-tail.

— by Marianne Moore

Arthur Michell Quote

A Life in Pictures.

“I believe in my mask — The man I made up is me.” Sam Shepard

— ‘Crow’s Song’, Tooth of Crime

“I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression,” Shepard said of his early plays.
Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe
(via)

Sam Shepard appreciation by Stephen Rea

‘He was the kindest man, truthful, witty and generous’

Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders (Paris/Texas)

(The Right Stuff)
From Philip Kaufman, Sam was half jackrabbit and best chili maker

Sam was half jackrabbit, and I could rely on that sense of Sam the writer. It seems to me that his plays all sprang fully out of Sam’s character. He wasn’t writing about something he didn’t know much about. The tale was always some ghost that he was searching for. That ghost was always hovering, so he was very productive.

Sam Shepard on Days of Heaven (youtube)

Full film – with John Malkovich& Gary Sinise-

The Voyager

Sam’s greatest roles.

1. Name the film in which he co-stars with Penelope Cruz.
2. In what film is he killed in a car bombing?
3. What TV film earned him an Emmy nomination?
4. Which of his films featured the music suite “The Carnival of the Animals” by French composer Saint-Saens?
5. In what film is he bitten by a badger?
6. Name the film in which he says – “Anybody that goes up in the damn thing is gonna be Spam in a can”.
7. In what film does he visit the Louvre?
8. Which film did he star in that was previously a Shepard play?
9. In what film does he play Dad to seven sons?
10. Name the film in which he plays a veterinarian.
11. In what film does he ride a motorcycle?
12. In “Brothers” he plays a Vietnam vet. Name the film in which he plays a very disturbing and dangerous Vietnam vet.
13. Spud is his character’s name. Can you name the film?
14. Name the film based on a Beth Henley play.
15. In real life we know he’s a playwright, but in what film does he play a writer of hard-boiled detective stories?
16. Name the film that was based on a biography called “Shadowlands” by William Arnold.
17. Name in the film in which Eva Marie Saint plays his mother.
18. In what film is his character a train robber?
19. He directed Sean Penn in one of his plays but can you name the film in which Sean Penn directed him?
20. Name the film that tells a true 1993 war story in Somalia.

Find answers here scroll down

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Edward Albee R I P.

The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? A Delicate Balance

LA times Obit here..

Edward Albee was my mailman

Samuel Becket at 73
by Richard Avedon

Samuel Beckett Died on 22 December 1989.

Samuel Beckett Draws Doodles of Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce & Hats

Samuel Beckett discusses forms with Harold Pinter.

Beckett and Chess

Poet John Montague, a close friend of his fellow Irishman in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, tells me that Beckett, who was ill at ease with people he didn’t know well, would sit in a cafe moving the objects on the table around, “playing a fantasy game of chess”, as Montague puts it. It is also tempting to see Beckett treating the stage like a chessboard.

Endgame in particular is, as the title makes clear, infused with chess.

As always with Beckett, there is no easy key to understanding. Chess is clearly a subtext of Endgame – his biographer Deirdre Bair says Beckett was clear on this point – but it is difficult to be reductive.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett quote tatooed on Stan Wawrinka’s arm.

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Interview in Vogue, December 1969: “Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. Democritus pointed the way: ‘Naught is more than nothing.'”

To Samuel Beckett archive here.

Madame Sade
‘Starkly ascetic regarding the physical effects, yet vibrating with sensibility.’

La Ronde Gerard Philippe

David Hare – Blue Room

The Draem master:The stories of Arthur Schnitzler, the amoral voice of fin-de-siècle Vienna.
By Leo Carey

“Anatol” established Schnitzler as the sardonic, amoral voice of his generation.

Meanwhile, as he entered his forties, the pace of his sex life was becoming a little less frenetic. In 1903, he married Olga Gussmann, an aspiring actress and singer twenty years his junior, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The Schnitzlers became part of the Viennese cultural élite, in which, it seems, everyone knew everyone. Gustav and Alma Mahler were friends, as were Stefan Zweig, Bruno Walter, Felix Salten, and Franz Werfel. The satirist Karl Kraus was an enemy.

Arthur Schnitzler

List of films based on Arthur Schnitzler

Alain Delon was in two films based on Schnitzler – Christine (Youtube) , The Return of Casanova
(CHRISTINE is a 1958 French film, based on the novel “Liebelei”)

Circle of Love (Jane Fonda directed by Roger Vadim).

The Bachelor (Keith Carradine’s homepage).

Previous post:Kubrick on Carl Jung and Arthur Schnitzler (Eyes Wide Shut was based on Arthur Schnitzler)

Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Arthur Schnitzler, Oskar Kokoschka | Illustration: K. Klein
(via The Age of Insight )