Denver Center Blog

Once more, with feeling

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:34 -0600

The musical of Les Misérables, based on Victor Hugo’s epic saga,  retains all of its sheen in 33 years of undimmed popularity—and counting.

by Sylvie Drake

With the release of the film made of the musical based on Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and considering that musical’s 33-year record run on stage, one has to ask: Why? Why does this show never seem to lose its luster? Is it the pathos? The action drama? The deep well of sentiment (as opposed to sentimentality) on which it draws? The pervasive heroics and genuine heroism of the piece?

The answer is all of the above, as well as producers—chiefly Cameron Mackintosh—who are good at keeping the production strong and fresh.

But hang on to that word heroism.

In this second decade of the 21st century there is a hunger within for genuine heroes or, as Maya Angelou so wisely put it, she-roes. Les Miz has more than one of each, whereas our modern world is pretty much devoid of larger-than-life characters. It is a world where the late Joseph Campbell found “every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality and art… in full decay.”

Strong condemnation, but it is true that we have lost our dragon-slayers. We re-invent them in comic strips, on You Tube, film and television—or substitute a cult of celebrity in their stead. Thin gruel by comparison.

The English language classifies hero as masculine, but Angelou was more than half-right. The word is in fact derived from a woman’s name: Hero, the legendary Aphrodite who threw herself into the sea when her lover Leander drowned swimming the Hellespont just to be with her. Granted, that was more of an emotional than a moral response, and not all of Webster’s definitions of heroism are particularly exalted. The one that comes closest to paydirt is this: “Bravery, nobility, fearlessness, valor.”

Apply these words to Les Miz and you feel the richness—in Jean Valjean’s innate nobility and valor; in that half-pint Gavroche’s fearlessness; in Fantine’s bravery in the face of overwhelming odds or Eponine’s readiness to take a bullet if it can save Marius for whom she has an unrequited love—and even in the final act of Inspector Javert who can no longer bear to live with what he has become.

In the end, it is the totality of Hugo’s massive canvas that works—the contradictions of its operatic scope and its intimate humanity in a marriage of social, political and emotional upheaval with intensely personal stories of private pain and struggle.

And what stories they are. Not content to spin strictly subjective tales, Hugo wanted his entire world to reverberate through his writing. He said he wanted to be the écho sonore or “loud echo” of his day. Although he ostensibly belonged to no church, a religious thread frequently ran through his work. He claimed Les Miz as “religious.” But it is an eloquent compassion, wedded to innate wisdom and a sense of balance that are at the core of the grandeur of his prose.

Les Misérables was a very long book, full of plots and subplots, and took years to complete, but it was only following the accidental death by drowning of his grown daughter Léopoldine—a terrible blow—that he immersed himself in earnest into the writing of it. Memories of his daughter probably informed the character of Cosette, just as memories of his own student days informed that of Marius. Aside from his phenomenal agility with language, Hugo’s genius was a transcending talent for getting to the universal through the particular, weaving the smaller human tales into the sociopolitical fabric of his day.

Les Misérables was published in 1862 and took France and all Europe by storm. It was immediately translated into several languages. The author was astounded by the novel’s success. Even if people rarely plough through its almost 2,000 pages any more, it remains his best-known work, largely because its popularity has been re-ignited by the musical’s charismatic appeal.

Toward the end of the novel, Hugo writes this: “The book which the reader has before him at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and details…a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God…”

So much for the lofty ambitions of the book. But one cannot discount the contributions of the team that created the musical, from bookwriter Alain Boublil’s ability to condense and adapt such a massive epic for the stage, to Herbert Kretzmer’s superlative English translation of the original French, to the stirring anthems by Claude-Michel Schönberg who created a score that seems drawn from the novel’s rib.

More than 150 years after the novel’s publication, we still thrill to this account of an escaped convict’s struggle for a chance at redemption because its sensibility is true to any age. Hugo’s gift for evoking an ambience of mystery, his operatic characters, the quest for justice where none exists, the depiction of a people in revolt, all contribute to this modern attraction. Jean Valjean may have all the earmarks of a hero but he goes them one better: he is a flawed, deeply injured and profoundly moral man who, in his vulnerability and compassion, becomes the idealized model of a person with whom we all want to identify.

French playwright Paul Claudel called Hugo’s vision his “panic contemplation” of the universe. Writer Léon Fargue called him “un poéte d’avenir” or a poet of the future. That future is now and Hugo’s  masterwork remains as fresh, provocative and rousing as ever.

Les Misérables plays Denver’s Buell Theatre May 22-26. Tickets are limited and may be purchased at 800/641-1222.

Let Them Drink Beer: Curating theatre that feels like a night out

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:52 -0600

Off-Center is a new theatre experience developed by the Denver Center Theatre Company. It’s theatre that feels like a night out – fewer formalities, less sitting still, more beer, more fun. Everything is guided by the desire to be immersive, convergent, connective, inventive and “in the now.” Its curators — Charlie Miller and Emily Tarquin — recently gave their “recipe” for this innovative theatre experience to Theatre Communications Group.

Free beer (or even cheap beer) may be the easiest and fastest way to tap into a new audience. Drinks, food, socializing, and costumes (on the audience, not the performers) are what young Denver locals look for in a night out. Translation: they aren’t looking for theatre.

How do we know? We happen to be young Denverites ourselves and have attended and studied the events that draw the demographic we desire. And most importantly, we asked. We started by conducting focus groups with the young, adventurous, and unattainable. We gave them free beer, asked them what they wanted in a night out, and why they weren’t currently attending our shows. One twenty-something replied bluntly, “Theatre is a bad brand.”

Like many performing arts organizations, the Denver Center Theatre Company (DCTC) is concerned about aging audiences and the challenges of engaging the next generation of theatergoers. Not only does the word “theatre” come with baggage but it also competes with any number of inexpensive social events. Denver offers a range of activities from live music to sports to food truck flash mobs to ping pong warehouses to biking in costumes while drinking. Its 5:00 on a Friday, you have $20 bucks from the ATM or if you’re lucky $40…what would you do?

Our solution: let them drink beer. But behind the beer is a model for curating a complete audience experience before, during, and after the show. We’ve removed the waiting in the lobby for the show to begin. We’ve removed the curtain speech with the endless instructions. We’ve removed the separation between artist and audience. And we’ve added beer, snacks, costumes, and ways to get involved, not just watch.

At Off-Center @ The Jones, DCTC’s home for this new approach to programming, the show starts the minute you walk in the door. Whether you’re putting on costumes in the bathrooms, submitting ideas for that night’s show, or mixing Pop Rocks and beer, you’re involved.

Each show is created with the full experience in mind. Artistic, marketing, development, audience engagement, and production are all equal players in the creation of a show. What’s going on in the lobby? What’s happening online? What happens once the performance ends? What community partnerships can we develop to strengthen the experience and broaden our reach? It’s all part of the show, it’s all part of our Recipe for programming, and it’s all part of making theatre feel like a night out.

For example, take our show DRAG MACHINE, a drag queen time machine that explored the history of drag and its effect on the gay rights’ movement. At home, on your couch, you could create your own drag name using on our online Drag Name Generator and learn how to give yourself a drag makeover with our instructional video. We transformed the theatre lobby into an airport terminal so the show started the minute you entered and were handed cotton candy. Our flight attendants conducted security screenings with fairy wands, Captain Shirley Delta Blow counted down to takeoff over the loudspeakers, and a screen showed arrivals and departures with delays due to “raining men”. Then in order to freshen up for your flight into the Gay Universe, you had to decide which bathroom to enter – Kings or Queens? Inside, we provided the proper makeup, mustaches, wigs, and feather boas to become either one.

The bar was onstage until the show started and, to complete the scene, our ushers costumed in shiny pink vests and rainbow bow ties were straight out of our target demographic. We’ve branded them Team-OFF and they act as our advisory board, street team, and volunteers. In return, they get to participate in creating the shows and get free admission to all of our events. It’s the perfect combination for people who might not have the money, might have some extra time, and might want a creative outlet from their day jobs.

Our approach to curating theatrical experiences was designed through the Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts, created and administered by EmcArts and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Trust. The eight-month Innovation Lab process allowed us to research, develop, test, and implement our ideas around new programming and audience engagement. It also helped our organization build the capacity and resources needed to be innovative and support this new initiative.

Off-Center is a test kitchen for the DCTC where we prototype with new forms and techniques to attract and engage the next generation of audiences and artists. We function cross-departmentally so that every department can benefit from Off-Center’s research and development. The Jones is a space where we can take risks and the successes can be taken to scale elsewhere in the organization. The stakes are low, the tickets are cheap, and, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Molson Coors, the beer is free. It’s our opportunity to find out how to reach an audience who isn’t coming to the theatre and develop content that is relevant and directly appeals to them. This model makes every show a prototype and every audience a focus group.

You can find out more about our process by checking out our profile on ArtsFwd.

SWEAT wraps up Off-Center @ The Jones’ 2013/14 season playing May 17-18. Tickets: 800/641-1222

Let Them Drink Beer

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:20:33 -0600

Packing for Poppins: A Survival Guide to Packing on the Road

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:05:33 -0600

Whether it’s a carryon, a suitcase, a traveling trunk or — as in the case of Mary Poppins which flies into Denver’s Buell Theatre May 1-5 — a carpetbag, it takes a little organizational magic to pack when you are constantly on the road. So we turned to Madeline Trumble , who plays everyone’s favorite nanny to get some helpful, handy tips.

1. How many markets will you travel to during your run as Mary?

Oh my goodness, I think I’ve traveled to about forty different cities, in three different countries. And we still have a few stops left!

2. Do you get to go back home between any of the engagements?

I took a week’s vacation and so I got to go back home a few months ago. But I didn’t get to go home home, because someone’s staying in my apartment while I’m away. BUT I got to go back to New York, where my home and heart is. And next week, we play San Francisco, so I get to return to where I grew up (Berkeley, CA). I can’t wait to see my mom and perform for my community!

3. Assuming that you have to pack once in preparation for several national stops before returning home, how do you start? Do you even bother checking the weather forecast? Take a look at the local Convention & Visitors Bureau site to see what to expect? Pick up a copy of the most recent Farmer’s Almanac?

I had to pack for ten months of tour from the get go. So, I had to pack for all weathers. We pretty much travel every single Monday. We RARELY get any sort of a break. So, I have everything from sandals and summer dresses, to boots and coats. I am a self proclaimed fashionista (I have an enormous collection of vintage clothing) so it was really tough to scale down for the road. We’re allowed two suitcases, a carryon and a trunk, which is about the size of a third suitcase. NOT ENOUGH ROOM! And also- you do a lot of shopping on the road. I’ve probably doubled my wardrobe. I’m constantly sending boxes back home to California to make more room in my suitcases for new clothes!

4. Once you’ve determined what to take — we hope you are planning for layers in Denver — what’s next? Is there “a place for everything and everything in its place”? Are you the organized, straight as a pin folder? The never-wrinkled roller? Or the helter skelter toss-and-go type?

Everyone has their own system. I kind of have one junk suitcase- I keep a lot of odds and ends in there, along with my toiletries. And then I have a big suitcase full of a bag of dresses, two different bags for shirts, bag for skirts, bag for underwear, bag for socks, bag for socks, bag for sunglasses, etc. But everything has it’s place because my suitcases are exactly 49 lbs each!

5. Knowing that, as with most Broadway tours, you pack a larger trunk and then have a carryon, what type of carryon do you recommend? Do you — a la Mary Poppins — have a carpetbag? Maybe a lightweight canvas bag on wheels? Or one of those impenetrable hard cases?

Oh No. I need as much room as possible, so I have a carryon with four wheels! I love those spinner suitcases! It lets me push and pull all three of my bags at once. I also have a great lululemon bag with a hundred pockets to take with me on the plane. It can hold anything.

6. Now every proper nanny out there, and your average Jill too, wants to know what’s in your carryon. What is so important that you can’t trust it in your trunk? Your makeup bag? The latest Cosmo? Your laptop? Or maybe even one of P.L. Traver’s eight books about that “practically perfect in every way” nanny who arrives by umbrella and befriends charming chimney sweeps?

I always have my makeup bag, my wallet, and my diabetes kit (I have Type 1, or Juvenile Diabetes). And I have a cool DSLR camera I don’t trust anywhere else but by my side. I also have a book and a magazine on me at all times. And my iphone. Always my iphone. Though that’s usually in my hand and not in my bag.

7. What’s your trick to making the most of the monotony of airports? Have you ever arrived to the airport unprepared — missing your ID, forgetting a bag, leaving your cell phone in a cab?

Absolutely not! I’ve been touring for about a year. I know what I’m doing! I’ve had pretty good luck!

8. Tell us something funny or unusual that’s happened while out on the road. How did you react? How would Mary react?

I’ve led a pretty boring life out here on the road. I’ve gotten to really see the country and meet its people. That’s been the most exciting part. Meeting people all over the country who love theatre and love Mary Poppins- it’s been really amazing to see so many different kinds of people reacting in the same way to our show.

9. What would Mary’s advice be for the average traveler looking to pack for a trip? A spoonful of sugar may be a bit suspicious in your carryon.

Less is more! Which is definitely ironic coming from the girl with the heaviest luggage, but if I could do it all over again, I would pack a lot less. Think in outfits, not in individual pieces. And- one coat is enough. You don’t need five.

Mary Poppins plays Denver’s Buell Theatre through May 5. Tickets: 303.893.4100.

Coloring the world blue: The history of Blue Man Group

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:00:43 -0600

Matt Goldman, Chris Wink and Phil Stanton are entrepreneurs who created and oversee a global enterprise that has brought joy to more than 17 million people. They are also innovators, educators, artists, and contemporary comedians, known collectively as the founders and originators of Blue Man Group. That these three bald and blue characters would become a cultural phenomenon is an idea that was all but unimaginable when these inscrutable beings first emerged, walking the streets of New York.

“We weren’t really goal-oriented,” says Stanton. “When we started walking around the city, we did it because we wanted to see how people reacted. And being bald and blue was our social life. We didn’t want to go to bars and be part of a singles scene, a drinking scene. We wanted our social life to be somehow creative, and this was a lot of fun. We knew we would eventually do some kind of performance, but we never envisioned a commercial theater run.”

The show is an absurd and wondrous blend of music, painting, science and technology, as the Blue Men silently engage in a variety of set pieces that run the gamut from primitive and childlike to witty and sophisticated.

“It’s all about creativity and innovation,” says Puck Quinn, creative director of character development and appearances. “If someone asks, ‘What does Blue Man Group do?,’ my answer is simple: ‘We innovate.’”

Everything begins with the Blue Man, and although he’s been around for more than two decades, his founders still can’t entirely explain where he came from. Like the character himself, his origin is enigmatic.

“There really isn’t an explanation,” says Goldman. “Chris dug up a picture that he drew when he was five years old, and it had three blue men in it. And I had a thing in my wallet for years with a blue tribe in South America. I don’t know why it was there; I never put pictures in my wallet. We think the Blue Man has always been here. The best answer is that we found each other.”

The impulse for going bald and blue emerged, in part, when the three longtime friends observed a clash of cultures on a New York sidewalk that no one else noticed.

“We saw three punk rockers – giant Mohawks, safety pins in the cheekbone area, leather and chains – walk between three other gentlemen who were dressed in Armani suits and carrying alligator briefcases,” says Goldman. “These six guys didn’t even blink, and the people around them didn’t even blink. And we turned to each other and said, ‘If that scene didn’t even get one iota of consciousness put to it, what human imagery possibly could?”

Eventually, an image began to emerge.

“We thought, ‘What would surprise people?” says Stanton. “‘What’s going to catch someone’s eye and make them think?’ We thought that if we created a bald and blue character, that image would have the ability to surprise and spark some thought for a long time.”

Goldman adds, “The first time we got bald and blue, we knew instantly it was something very special. And it was so freeing, because it wasn’t us. Our own egos were gone.”

The traits of the Blue Man developed gradually.

“There was something about him that seemed timeless, and something that seemed a little bit futuristic,” says Stanton. “He seemed to have the ability to be beautiful and comic at the same time. I’m not even sure we thought about that at first. It was really intuitive. We were trying to create a character that somehow represented humanity, but was able to be outside of humanity and look at it at the same time. We wanted to make a statement about community, about the power of a group, as opposed to the American individualist mentality. We thought the character would express community through something tribal, and drumming seemed the way to go. Chris had trained as a drummer, and I was from a really musical background. We wanted to draw from our own interests and backgrounds, and bring them into some kind of performance. We wanted to express something about the process, or the impulse to create.”

They continued to develop material for three years, performing in downtown clubs and event spaces. Two decades later, Goldman, Stanton and Wink are still tinkering with, refining, and updating the show. Each additional production, including the tour, provides an opportunity for new material.

“Sometimes we just see something that we think is really cool, and we’ll try and see how we can make it theatrical,” says Stanton.

Blue Man Productions, the parent company that oversees all projects, employs several hundred people around the world. Goldman, Stanton, Wink and their staff pay the same attention to the details of their business as they do to the details of their art.

“From the beginning, we valued what went on offstage as much as what went on onstage,” says Stanton. “It’s important to us how people are treated. The creativity that goes into what happens offstage is viewed as part of what ends up onstage. We never separate the two. We always wanted to own our own show, and live with the decisions that we made, rather than hand all of that off to somebody else. We want to be responsible for what happens, and we wanted to make sure it was a life-long journey.”

Blue Man Group plays Denver’s Buell Theatre April 12-21, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll free 800.641.1222 or TTY 303.893.9582.

Austen with Music

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:34:56 -0600

A musical based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility?
Makes perfectly sensible sense

By Sylvie Drake

There is an undeniable fascination with the works of Jane Austen that has propelled itself into some strong film and television adaptations of many of her novels. These range from Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice (many versions) to Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma and Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel.

Remarkable? Not entirely. There are good reasons. These 19th-century novels resonate in any age because they were the elegantly written soap operas of their day—and we’re all in love with love—at any age and in any age.

Now comes a first: a musical version of Sense and Sensibility. While several stage adaptations of Austen’s works have been attempted, “It’s the first time that a musical of Sense and Sensibility has been done on this scale,” said Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the director of Sense & Sensibility The Musical, adding, “I do try to keep up with everything Jane Austen.”

Milgrom Dodge staged a workshop of this world premiere at last year’s Colorado New Play Summit, where it was greeted with such enthusiasm that the decision was made fairly quickly to give it a full production this year—with the same director and with all the bells and whistles it deserves.

“I fell in love with it the minute I heard it,” Milgrom Dodge acknowledged on the line from her home in New York City a couple of months ago. “I plan to honor the authenticity of the period, but at the same time I am the connection to today, which is sort of my mantra doing theatre,” she said, reaffirming something that was evident in her 2009 Tony^®-nominated Broadway revival of the musical Ragtime.

“Why is this show different from all other shows? Why should we be doing it now? What makes it relevant to an audience today? I ask those kinds of searching questions,” she continued. “In this production the goal is to present a beautifully rendered period piece, in that we’re setting it in its own time. But we are not afraid to add some modern sensibilities.”

This importantly includes a chorus of society people serving much the same purpose that a chorus did in ancient Greek theatre. It’s the engine that helps move the story along. Milgrom Dodge sees it as the 1800s equivalent of today’s twitterers on their smart devices.

“No, we’re not pulling out cell phones,” she quickly reassured her listener. “Certainly we’re not doing anything anachronistic in that way, but in terms of the emotional presence that this chorus has in the piece, we want an audience to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, these people are just like twitterers.’ You know what I mean. They have that kind of nosy behavior, that sense of never-ending gossip, that need-to-know-everything that goes on today.

“They had no technology, but they had unbelievable word of mouth. The thing that’s exciting and challenging is that it sometimes took days to get the information from one place to another, whereas now it’s immediate. Everybody hears the same thing. So we’re in Portsmouth, we’re in London, we’re in the environs of England and we want to feel that people know and want to know everything immediately.

“That’s part of the charm of the piece in terms of the use of that ensemble. And,” she added, switching gears, “I’ve brought in an amazing design team for Denver.”

The team includes costume designer Emilio Sosa (known professionally as ESosa, of Broadway’s Porgy and Bess and TV’s “Project Runway”) and Broadway and opera set designer Allen Moyer (Grey Gardens, Twelve Angry Men). While the director does want to remain true to the early 1800s, she wants modern touches to liven up the production. Research at Chawton House, the Jane Austen library in Hampshire, England, showed demure shades of brown to be the rule for party clothes of the time. But…

“ ‘Brown doesn’t sound that exciting,’ I told Emilio,” she said. “He agreed. He has such a beautiful design eye, that we hope to bring in contemporary fabrics in bright colors that may not be truly authentic to the period, but that will add energy and sexuality to the piece.”

That, of course, is what theatre is supposed to do—not betray the truth but heighten it. Milgrom Dodge said she’s avoided watching the spate of Austen-based films in favor of more archeological influences: architectural renderings, drawings, paintings and props of the period. “I don’t want to be a plagiarizer of somebody else’s ideas; we’re creating this out of the historical material.”

As for the set, “We’re not in a proscenium theatre, we’re on a big thrust stage that presents a lot of opportunities as well as challenges. But the line of the script that turns out to offer a bit more of an option is when Edward Ferrars says to Elinor Dashwood how much he loves the country—the wild and the cultivated side by side. We took that as a cue to come up with a design that embraces both of those ideas.”

She demurred on offering more details. “I want people to be surprised, and yet I want them to feel that the choices [we made] are inevitable. Those ‘Aha!’ moments are what I hope for in the theatre. Powerful emotional responses. Of course they have to be there in the first place and this is the perfect show for them.”

The dancing in the production will be more or less book-ended by a country dance and a more formal high society harvest ball in London. But there is more. The ensemble/chorus, for instance, has specific movement.

“As a choreographer/director, I always approach my shows from a strong sense of behavior, gesture, movement,” Milgrom Dodge explained. “I like to say that you could come to my production and understand the story if the sound went out. I try to create a very strong physical core. It’s not artificial and not over-stylized; it’s as truthful as I can discover with each character.

“It also helps the transitions. We have a lot of places to go to, a lot of locations. The scenery will have to move…”

In late February, well before coming to Denver for the start of rehearsals, the creative team—consisting of bookwriter and lyricist Jeffrey Haddow, composer Neal Hampton, music supervisor David Loud and conductor Paul Masse—was putting in long hours in the studio going over the music and transitions. The real work had begun and Milgrom Dodge was feeling very good about it.

“I have information now; I now know what the physical production will be. Neal is working hard at creating musical transitions that may not have existed before. We had not factored in costume and set changes. Over the course of the last few days I’ve learned about new craft, new scenic gestures I want, new music that helps emphasize the arrival of scenic events.

“David Loud is an extraordinary, wise, beautiful, experienced music supervisor. I love this part of the work. Everyone involved is very flexible, very respectful of the work; the criticism is said with love and received with love. We feel strongly that we’re going into rehearsal with an extremely tight script. It’s all about tweaking now—adding new orchestrations, staying open. We’ll have a few preview performances and audiences will tell us what else needs to be done.”

It’s never easy to take a sprawling novel and reduce it to its essentials. Some of the Austen characters aren’t in the musical, yet their absence takes nothing away from the central story.

“It is Sense & Sensibility The Musical, not Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” Milgrom Dodge reminded us. “Neal’s music lets you feel that we’re in another time and place, but there are beautiful harmonics in the piece, certain chords that tug at my heart.

I believe,” she added almost wistfully, “that the best stories are the ones that are so specific to their time and place that they transcend it and become universal. Everybody loves love, everybody wants love and everybody feels bereft without it.”

The world premiere of Sense & Sensibility The Musical plays Denver’s Stage Theatre April 5-May 26, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100 or 800.641.1222.

Desert Homecoming

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:50 -0600

Other Desert Cities playwright Jon Robin Baitz expounds on the
Left Coast, the political Right and an artist’s necessary exile

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

The playwright Jon Robin Baitz walks healthily among the living, but in some ways his articulate, carefully constructed plays feel like throwbacks to a more literate, less cynical age. Plays such as The Substance of Fire, Three Hotels and The Paris Letter, map out internecine battles of love and loyalty among family, friends and lovers with a comic clarity that evokes Shaw, and a fraught psychological texture, thick with explosive secrets and lies, that recalls Ibsen.

Given those antecedents, it’s surprising that his career until last year was bookended by two formative West Coast experiences that would seem to belie his plays’ well-made classicism.

A native of Los Angeles, Baitz got his first playwriting education from the now-defunct Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, where mavericks like John Steppling, and Maria Irene Fornes pushed the form to its extremes. Then, after success as a New York-based playwright, Baitz went back West in 2006 to create the hit ABC-TV drama “Brothers & Sisters,” only to be fired after the show’s first season in a welter of mutual recrimination. It left him reeling and, as he admits now, “half-mad.”

From the ashes of that defeat came a phoenix called Other Desert Cities, another play about smart, funny people with deadly serious problems. It opened to acclaim off-Broadway in early 2011 and transferred to Broadway that fall, constituting Baitz’s long-overdue main stem debut as a proper playwright. (His adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler came to Broadway in 2001.) Though the play isn’t autobiographical, Baitz says he wrote much of his own fired-from-TV frustration into Brooke Wyeth, a nervy novelist who returns to her parents’ Palm Springs home for the holidays bearing a tell-all memoir that could rattle every last skeleton in their closet.

Backed up in part by her barely-sober aunt Silda, Brooke challenges the complacency of her formidable parents—an avuncular film actor, Lyman, and a whipsmart former screenwriter, Polly, Hollywood Republicans who were once close with the Reagans.

In a not-coincidental overlay, the family’s political differences are exacerbated by the timing: The play is set in 2004—one month after President George W. Bush was re-elected and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretched ahead seemingly indefinitely.

Baitz sat down late last fall in New York to talk about the play’s genesis, his arm’s-length love for his hometown, and other pertinent matters.

Rob Weinert-Kendt: A lot of the play’s energy derives from an East Coast/West Coast divide. Brooke’s parents moved West, remade themselves and raised their kids there. But she rejected that and moved back to New York.

Jon Robin Baitz: It’s interesting because my brother and I have both done the same thing. He’s a composer and I’m a playwright, and we both sort of rejected some idea of being comfortable in LA.

I could not in fact have written the play from LA. I had to be in exile. It’s very much a play about exile. The Wyeths have placed themselves, for various reasons, in this scorching, stultifying desert, where everything is sort of in amber, from 1972 to 1980-something, the Annenberg/Reagan years. I think I’ll probably keep coming back to LA as a subject. Or the West.

RWK:Right, Palm Springs isn’t LA; it’s a whole other state of mind.

JRB: It is. Palm Springs is about the suspension of all but the mirage. It has a kind of eternally beautiful-and-damned quality about it that I find compelling. Tremendous beauty, tremendous exhaustion. Retirement in all senses.

RWK: When you said “mirage,” I thought Las Vegas, but that feels more transient. Folks really plant themselves in Palm Springs.

JRB: Completely. After my dad retired from Carnation, my parents bought a house in Palm Springs, behind gates, with some tennis courts, a little community. They would go back and forth between LA, their little condo off Burton Way, and their little house in Palm Springs. I understand the desire to separate yourself from the forces of nature because the forces of nature in modern urban living are pretty ugly. It’s precisely the refusal to admit those forces that makes the place so compelling.

RWK: The play was written during the Bush era, but do you think its politics still resonate in the age of Obama and will continue to be relevant?

JRB: I think they will, given the identity confusion within conservative American politics, which is so much a part of the play and of my own area of interest—how a party shifts on its axis and becomes something else, while there are these marriages going on between unlikely bedfellows who seem to marry their ideas together in a kind of odd nexus of government interfering in certain parts of your life and not in others.

RWK: But the brand of moderate Republican represented by Polly and Lyman seems absent from the national political stage.

JRB: Well, because they have been silenced and kicked out and replaced by Tea Party politicians—and usually, with all possible respect, somewhat illiterate Tea Party politicians who have no sense of macro- or micro-economics, no sense of American history or who misread it endlessly. So the people in this play are virtually extinct, and they’re in the desert near those dinosaurs at Cabazon.

RWK: Polly and Silda are very entertaining, acidly witty characters. Did they ever threaten to run away with the play?

JRB: Yes. There are places where Silda occasionally hijacked the play; I’d write pages and pages and you’d just see the play vanishing in the distance, and Silda doing “The Silda Hour.” That’s why one does drafts. I certainly heard them very clearly, Silda and Polly. Restraint is everything, of course, and to let them go unfettered would actually become sort of monotonal.

RWK: Do you calibrate funny vs. not funny as you write?

JRB: It’s all in the service of the narrative. A joke is only useful if it does a lot of other work.

RWK: Brooke is there to dump cold water on everything. She has a lot of fine qualities, but you’re not easy on her.

JRB: She’s had a lot of trouble. She’s capable of being funny, but she’s got a lot of scar tissue. My characters tell me what they are. And a lot of the way Brooke feels is the way I’ve felt at various times in my life when I’ve been in extremis. She’s a portrait of the artist in despair. And when you’re decompensating, humor is very hard to find, unfortunately.

RWK: Your despair came after your “Brothers & Sisters” breakup?

JRB: Totally. The Brooke despair was my trying to make sense of having left LA the way I did, in personal misery, professional misery—with this kind of hysterical, half-crazy, incredibly self-destructive faux-truth-telling. Telling the truth is perhaps my expensive hobby, you know? For some people it’s horses.

RWK: Brooke may represent the artist speaking her truth, but you let the other characters speak a lot of opposing truths back to her.

JRB: Listen, I think there’s a danger in being outraged and having self-righteousness to the extent that she does. The certitude is troubling, the sense of entitlement on some level is really very dangerous—the lack of humility, the notion that you can appropriate without consequences, that your moral center is so much more beautiful than everyone else’s. And people lie to themselves, even a recovering depressive who’s just finding her way back. I think sometimes the fear of depression is much worse than the depression, and Brooke is in that state; she’s running as fast as she can away from another episode, and she’ll do anything she can.

Brooke has the same disease that her mother has—this sort of absolutism. In her mother’s case, it’s sort of wonderful, because she’ll sort of fight to the death for this family, this cause of hers.

RWK: Until that fight doesn’t have any love in it anymore.

JRB: Well, love is not necessarily a soft and pleasant thing. I’ve been loved very hard by people. I’m very conservative when it comes to things like decency, just basic decency. And I guess the play is so simple, on some fundamental level: It argues for humility in the face of what you don’t know and compassion in the face of what you do know.

Other Desert Cities plays Denver’s Space Theatre March 29-April 28, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100 or 800.641.1222

Rob Weinert-Kendt is associate editor at American Theatre, and has written about theatre and the arts for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle. A slightly different version of this piece ran in the December 2012 issue of Performances magazine.

A Weekend with Pablo Picasso's Composer: Bruno Louchouran

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:00:44 -0600

Bruno Louchouarn’s compositions range from the cantina music heard in the film Total Recall, to works for orchestra, ballet, theatre and multimedia performance pieces. After graduate studies in Paris, he earned a Ph.D. in music composition at UCLA. Currently, Louchouarn teaches music, multimedia, and cognitive science at Occidental College. His work has been widely performed, including at Redcat in Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall, UCLA’s Royce Hall, Zipper Hall, the Getty Villa, the Getty Center, the Pasadena Playhouse, the San Diego Rep, Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena, La MaMa in New York City, and the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, as well as many university venues. He also created the musical score for Herbert Siguenza’s A Weekend with Pablo Picasso and talked with PROLOGUE about that experience.

PROLOGUE: First, how do you pronounce your last name?

Bruno Louchouarn: Loo-SHWARN. It’s an old Celtic family name from Brittany—my heritage is both Breton and Mexican.

P: Can you tell me how you approached your musical score for A Weekend with Pablo Picasso?

BL: The story follows the 78-year-old Picasso over the period of three days in 1957 when he’s rushing to start—and finish—a commission for six paintings and two vases on deadline. It’s both a memory play and a performance piece. The play celebrates Picasso’s incredible energy, humor, joie de vivre and creative genius as he plows through this incredible weekend. So the score had to be very buoyant, animated, colorful, descriptive and add just the right soundscape for this amazing artist.

P: Sounds like a dream assignment. Did you start with the period, the art or the music of that time?

BL: It was a tall order. I needed to be familiar with the European art of the early to middle 20th century—which I already was, to a certain extent. I had studied in Paris for a few years and had spent lots of time in the Louvre, one of the world’s great art museums. From that background, I created a theme for this show that changes shape during the performance, much like Picasso’s paintings transform throughout the process of creation.

P: Had you researched the music of the period and place?

BL: Oh, yes. I explored the popular and folk musical styles of France and Spain during this period. Classical music of this period was also incredibly innovative. My score uses clarinet, double bass, guitar, percussion, accordion and piano to underscore and color Picasso’s journey in creating these six paintings. The instruments I chose are so versatile—I can get endless colors and feelings by combining and recombining them.

P: Would you classify the music as pastiche—trying to exactly re-create the musical styles of the 1950s in Europe?

BL: No, not at all, although I try to suggest the musical flavors of the period—the French post-war popular music, as well as Picasso’s Spanish roots, and memory music of Picasso’s early years. A lot of the score, though, is more about emotion, mood, action, and in that way it is more like a movie soundtrack: musical flavor, musical commentary, musical exploration. [It] intertwines four themes: Picasso’s Spanish identity, his self-exile to France, Modernism, and the politics of an era clouded by war and Fascism.

P: Tell me more about your musical choices, for instance in creating a soundscape to underscore the concept of Cubism.

BL: Well, for one thing, I used what we call a “prepared piano”—I put thumb tacks, paper clips and other kinds of hardware onto the hammers of the piano, to get a kind of angular, edgy, metallic sound. I also crawled under the lid of the piano and played the strings with drumsticks, kind of like a zither or hammered dulcimer. I also encouraged my musicians to experiment with unexpected sounds and textures. Think of 20th Century composers like Conlon Nancarrow or Harry Partch who not only composed but invented musical instruments to suit their needs.

P: How do you work with your musicians while rehearsing and recording?

BL: I like to involve the musicians in creating a piece. I enjoy more the rehearsal process than the finished product. Rehearsal for me is pure joy. One of those joys is response and feedback from the musicians. Part of the learning experience is humility, you know. Master musicians can teach you more than a thing or two. You learn what works, what doesn’t, and it becomes part of your language.

P: Can you tell me about working with Herbert Siguenza, the author and performer of Picasso, in creating this piece?

BL: We worked together right from the beginning. Herbert knew my music from my concerts and performances in Los Angeles and approached me when his project was still in the infant stages. We sat together and watched film of Picasso actually painting; we discussed his career, his unique personality, his approach to painting and art, his impact on modern art—and Herbert’s theatrical style, developed in part through his work with L.A.’s Culture Clash.

I started creating musical themes, and sketching the musical score, bringing in musicians, often one at a time, to rehearse and record. At the same time, Herbert was working on drafts and workshops of his script. I built the musical underscoring so it could be flexible enough to stretch or shrink, as required by how the play developed.

P: Did you also contribute to the sound design of the show?

BL: I did. In addition to a sort of café orchestra feel, I also used modern instrumental effects such as sirens and explosions to create an aural context for Picasso’s Guernica, his iconic work on the bombing of the town in Spain’s Basque region during the Spanish Civil War. That era teemed with orchestral invention. I’ve always been fascinated with the Modernist movement in 20th-century music.

P: I understand that Herbert’s play gets into not only Picasso’s art and creative process, but also the political realities of the periods he lived through—and his reactions to them.

BL: Keeping in mind Picasso’s own statement, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” Herbert tackles the role of this legendary artist as he actually paints on stage—and also how he reacts to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Picasso clearly had patriotic feelings for Spain, but he was always absorbed first and foremost by his art. Many think that Guernica, commissioned for the 1937 Paris Exhibition, was his crowning achievement.

P: Herbert features a lot of Picasso’s quotable quotes in the show, along with an almost Cirque du Soleil exuberance, full of movement, painting and color. Creating music and sounds for this show must have been thrilling.

BL: This is such rich material for a composer. There’s so much going on. Herbert showcases Picasso’s proclamations about children, war, ambition, God, love, hate, beauty, friendship, patriotism, eternity—and art as an agent of social change.

P: He plays Picasso and actually paints on stage during the show. The work of the musical score must in part be to reinforce and lift Herbert’s dynamic performance as Picasso the painter.

BL: Yes. Music can do so much to expand the emotional life of a performance. My goal was to musically echo the childlike joy—and hard work—of creation, and also the sense of the clock ticking both as Picasso rushes to finish these six paintings (and two vases) over three days on France’s south coast—and as the man confronts his advancing age. The audience is always delighted and rapt. I hope the music supports and buoys the spirit of the scenes.

A Weekend with Pablo Picasso plays Denver’s Ricketson Theatre March 22-April 28, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100 or 800.641.1222.

SPAM FACTS: From the National Tour

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:00:52 -0600

Spamalot uses 30 wireless microphones and consumes more than 2000 AAA batteries per month and runs over 1 mile of cable.

Among the props is a cow that weighs 45 pounds and it takes two stagehands to catapult it over the castle.

Spamalot uses approximately 40 coconuts per month, supplied by the Coconut King in Florida.

The set utilizes 25 line sets, 20 chain motors, and more than 10,000 pounds of stage weight.

It takes more than 60 people on stage and off to run each performance.

The Electrics Department uses 6 tanks of liquid carbon dioxide per week to create the low-ground fog effect and uses 8 fire extinguishers per week for the Feet of God “blast off” effect.

The orchestra uses a Spama-horn, an instrument specially developed for and used only in Spamalot.

There are more than 75 wigs (including facial hair) in the show, all hand-tied and made of human hair, yak hair, and synthetics supplied from New York, California, and London.

The mud make-up is a formula specially designed for Spamalot.

The poorest peasants’ costumes in the show are actually made of raw silk.

3 feet of “blood” has to be ironed prior to each performance.

There are over 100 undergarments in the show, including 30 pairs of men’s fishnets and 56 cod pieces.

The Lady of the Lake’s costumes are all comprised of hand-strung glass beads.

The costumes are not only made of a wide variety of fabrics, but many are made of molded ABS plastics, and even nuts and bolts. You are as likely to see a costumer with power tools as you are a sewing machine.

It’s a guarantee that one knight will lose their head every night.

Monty Python’s Spamalot plays Denver’s Buell Theatre March 28-30, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll free 800.641.1222 or TTY 303.893.9582.

Mary Poppins: The Hunt for PL Travers

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:00:44 -0600

by Michael Lassell

Like Mary Poppins, the character she created, P.L. Travers did not believe in explaining. She did, however, believe in self-mythologizing, leaving those intent on biographical criticism so confused in her wake that even her obituaries had the facts wrong (according to Valerie Lawson, author of Out of the Sky She Came, the definitive Travers biography).

PLT, as she was sometimes called, did not even take credit for “creating” Poppins. Instead, she insisted, the nanny with the upturned nose just came to her one day, much as she blows in on the East Wind in the opening chapter of Mary Poppins (1934). But whether Travers created the “Practically Perfect” Poppins—while convalescing from pleurisy in her Sussex, England, cottage—or merely channeled her, the world is in her debt.

Despite the obfuscation, many facts of the author’s life are indisputable. Pamela Lyndon Travers, as she was fully known in her adult life, was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia, in 1899 (although the dust jacket of one of her own books claims it was 1906). She took her professional name—Travers was her father’s first name—during a brief stint as a dancer and actor. In 1924, she left Australia permanently after which she lived principally in England, with periods in Ireland and the U.S. (for a time with the Navajo).

PLT’s early life was fairly idyllic, until her father died when she was only seven. The eldest of three girls, she was remarkably imaginative, given to pretending she was a hen, spending hours brooding on an imaginary nest of eggs. She loved reading and ingested the Brothers Grimm (especially the gory bits). For a time in her childhood she thought “grim” was another word for story. “Tell me a grim,” she would say.

This child fantasist grew up to become quite self-sufficient, very much an “independent woman,” and years ahead of her time. To quote from Caitlin Flanagan’s 2005 New Yorker piece, “Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it … [and as] she approached 40, she decided that she wanted a child… .[So she adopted] an infant, one of a pair of twins, and raised him as a single mother.”

After leaving Australia, where she had supported herself as a journalist, Travers matured into a poet, critic and essayist, and “a serious writer” of fiction and nonfiction books. Her circle of acquaintances included William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and her personal interests ran to mythology and mysticism (she was a longtime disciple of guru G.I. Gurdjieff). PLT reduced her alias to its initials to disguise her gender, hoping to escape the dismissive stereotype of the lightweight authoress.

The great success of Mary Poppins was immediately followed by Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935). Mary Poppins Opens the Door appeared in 1944, followed eight years later by Mary Poppins in the Park (1952). These four books—collections of stories with recurring characters rather than novels—are the core of the nanny’s canon. The last of the Poppins tales, Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, materialized in 1989.

Travers would not seem like the kind of person to be wooed by Walt Disney, but pursue her he did—or at least the film rights to Mary Poppins, a favorite of his daughters. It took Disney 20 years to convince the strong-willed and proprietary Travers to approve a script and sign on the dotted line, and it cost Disney five percent of the Mary Poppins gross. (Adjusted for inflation, the movie ranks as #23 on the list of all-time box-office earners.)

It took producer Cameron Mackintosh nearly as long to wrangle the stage rights. By the time he knew her, he says, “she was a frail old lady. But you could see that she had a steel rod going down her spine… She asked me lots of questions about her characters and what kind of musical I wanted to do on stage. When I started to dig for information I felt very much like Michael and Jane Banks waiting to be told, ‘You’ll do.’”

When Mackintosh finally acquired the theatrical rights, he met with Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, to talk about the possibility of a joint production. He gave Schumacher the treatment he had worked up for the stage musical and Schumacher gave Mackintosh an armful of documents from the Disney vault.

“It was amazing,” recalls Schumacher, “that Cameron had focused on many of the characters and episodes from the books that Travers wanted to include in the Mary Poppins film sequel that was never made.”

As is frequently the case with people who do not like to talk about their personal lives, that of Travers seems unusually freighted with frustration and conflict—especially in her relationships, both requited and not. Even her 50-year collaboration with illustrator Mary Shepard—herself the daughter of Ernest H. Shepard, who first drew Winnie the Pooh—was not always placid. Perhaps Julie Andrews described Travers best: “I liked her,” said the Oscar-winning Andrews. “She was an eccentric and rather tough old girl but a good-hearted one, I felt.”

Countless details from PLT’s life found their way into her books. After her father’s death, Travers found herself living with her Great Aunt Helen (known as Aunt Ellie), for whom PLT was named. Ellie was an irascible and sometimes bitter spinster, described as variously peremptory and humane, given to sniffing disapprovingly and to quoting every bromide in the book of child rearing. She seems clearly to have been, at least in part, the life model for Mary Poppins. Not coincidentally, she made a habit of carrying a carpetbag. Physically, Mary Poppins is described as resembling a Dutch doll that was one of PLT’s playthings as a girl.

Travers assigned her own father’s occupation—bank manager—to Mary Poppins’ employer, George Banks, along with her father’s money troubles. Two of the Banks children, as Lawson points out in her book, are named after two of PLT’s relatives in Australia. Even the Royal Doulton bowl that figures so prominently in “Bad Wednesday” from Mary Poppins Comes Back was an artifact from PLT’s childhood. And her childhood nurse sported an umbrella with a carved parrot head for a handle.

That Mary Poppins is so widely considered a loving caregiver is one of the central mysteries of the books. Jane and Michael Banks are simultaneously devoted to her and terrified of displeasing her. Far from rosy-cheeked and flirtatious, as she seems from the film, the literary Poppins is described as strict, stern, remote and rigid—and she can stop a child in its muddy tracks with her blue-eyed glare.

Aside from the frequent dreamlike adventures that take her charges out of the ordinary world, the Poppins program of parenting is not the kind of rearing you would expect children to enjoy—not today; not in Depression-era London, where the books are set; not in 1910, the period of the film.

What is unique about Mary Poppins is her ability to impose order to the chaotic Banks household and a modicum of normalcy (between episodes of sorcery). Is Mary a magical fairy godmother, a disapproving authority figure or a satisfying bit of both?

That generations of readers have loved Mary Poppins, and grieved at her successive departures from 17 Cherry Tree Lane, may be the biggest mystery of the conjuring nanny’s hold on our collective hearts. Maybe it is the unexpected complexity that makes us cherish both Poppins and Travers. They don’t offer us an easy life, just a fascinating one. If their enchanted rose gardens come with thorns, the flowers bloom in colors we have never before seen.

Pamela Travers died in 1996, four months short of her 97th birthday.

Michael Lassell is the author of Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida: The Making of the Broadway Musical, Tarzan: The Broadway Adventure and, with Brian Sibley, the forthcoming book on bringing Mary Poppins to the stage (all from Disney Editions).

Mary Poppins returns to Denver’s Buell Theatre May 1-5, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll free 800.641.1222 or TTY 303.893.9582.

An Evening with Herbert Siguenza

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:42:18 -0600

When Herbert Siguenza performed his A Weekend With Pablo Picasso at Houston’s Alley Theatre last year, he had a few things to say to The Alley’s Mark Bly about why he paints and why he took on the perilous task of not only impersonating an iconic artist on stage, but also of creating an actual painting on stage.

Mark Bly: What inspired you to write A Weekend With Pablo Picasso?

Herbert Siguenza: I was born with the mysterious gift of being able to draw. Since I was a young boy, I would press crayons against paper and create imaginary worlds and characters. In fact, when I was in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Sharp, would pull me out of the reading circle and have me draw on giant rolls of butcher paper instead. She kept everything I drew.

Later that semester, we went on a field trip to downtown San Francisco to visit City Hall and the Board of Education building. To my great surprise, there was an exhibit of all my work hanging in the halls! My fellow students were very impressed, and I was immensely proud as well.

That first exhibit made it clear to me that I would grow up to become an artist.

That same year, my mother took me to the dentist. While we waited in the reception area, I picked up a photo book by Douglas Duncan called The Private Life of Picasso. The beautiful black and white photos showed a shirtless old man who painted and played like a child. He also had doves, several dogs and a goat. I turned and said to my mom, “When I grow up I want to be that old man.”

“That’s Pablo Picasso,” she said. “Es loco” [“You’re crazy”]. My dear mother did not discourage me; I knew better. The old man Columbus was not crazy but rather unconventional and free, which inspired me profoundly to later live my own life in that manner. I eventually went to the California College of Arts in Oakland were I got a BFA in printmaking and taught for two years. I also worked for ten years at La Raza Silkscreen Center producing posters for cultural and political events.

All these experiences have contributed to my personal and artistic growth. I see this play as a result of everything I have ever learned in regard to the visual and theatrical arts. It is a perfect and natural marriage for me. A play that I was born to perform starting now. It is a culmination of everything I’ve known since I was a curious child. And yes, I still don’t read very well. Thank you, Mrs. Sharp!

MB: Would you talk about your process as an actor and playwright in creating the play? Where does the painter-artist Herbert Siguenza figure into this stage equation?

HS: I don’t have a formal education in theatre but rather, as I said, a degree in art. To a certain extent that has been very liberating, because I never overthink or analyze what I do. I simply act on a real instinctive level, free from academic philosophies. I just do. My character of Picasso is not an imitation of Picasso because that would be false or impossible. My character of Picasso is me as a rich, old man who paints and lives in southern France. It’s simple and direct.

After 30 years of performing comedy and drama on stage, I feel ready to take on the challenge of portraying an icon. I could never have portrayed him ten years ago, you know? I wasn’t ready to take on such a giant character. He is Falstaff or Big Papa from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Now on the script, I took all the quotes Picasso said during his lifetime and constructed an imaginary weekend in 1957 in his studio, Le Californie. I wanted to recreate the sights and sounds of the pictures I saw in Duncan’s wonderful photographs. My only goal as a playwright was for the audience to experience and feel like they are spending an intimate weekend with a master, a genius but also a Spanish man in exile.

Picasso said that viewing art is a kind of voyeurism. I think viewing theatre is even more voyeuristic, because we are seeing people in their most private moments. In my play I want no separation between performer and audience. The audience is a participant and the reason for the play. There are only a few moments where the audience “is not there” and watches Picasso at his most private and most vulnerable. As a painter I am also vulnerable, I paint and create in front of the audience. No safety net, no gimmicks—just magic and truth in action. Like my acting, I just do it without thinking. I think Picasso would be proud of me.

MB: Picasso’s relationship with 20th century political movements was complex and you explore that struggle in your play. Can you characterize that epic “tug and pull” between art and politics that manifested itself in Picasso’s work?

HS: Picasso’s long-time friend Jaime Sabartes said that, “Picasso is the most apolitical person I know.” I think to a certain degree it was true. Even though Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party and contributed to many leftist causes, he wasn’t politically or physically involved. He was sort of a Communist from afar. As long as he could paint what he wanted in freedom, he was content being in the Party for idealistic reasons.

He was an artist first and foremost and an activist second. I have struggled with that “tug and pull” in my own life as a Chicano/Latino actor-activist. At one point you have to decide what you were meant to do in this life, you know? Are you an artist or a politician?

Picasso remained free and true to his style, he never succumbed to the pressures of the party to paint in a social realist manner. I believe theatre that is didactic and pounds you over the head is the worst kind of theatre and does not accomplish what it wants to do in the first place: make people think. If art does the thinking for you, what’s the use? That’s why Guernica

is so amazingly powerful and eternal. It’s politically charged but aesthetically transcendental.

During the Cold War, Picasso did not fan the fire of nuclear destruction but rather was a global peace campaigner and contributed art and financial donations to many peace organizations and social causes. In fact, the iconography of the Peace Movement—the doves, flowers, children that are used today—was first created by Picasso in the late ’50s.

Picasso was a Humanist who just happened to be a Communist. We are lucky because Guernica, the peace dove, the hands holding flowers were created as if a child had drawn them, and that is why it has lasted so long because it connects with our inner child full of joy, happiness and hope.

A Weekend with Pablo Picasso plays Denver’s Ricketson Theatre March 22-April 28. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll-free: 800.641.1222 or TTY: 303.893.9582.

This interview originally appeared in the Alley Theatre’s program for A Weekend With Pablo Picasso. Reprinted with permission.

Top Myths about Monty Python's Spamalot

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:03:25 -0600

A few tips for Monty Python novices and wannabes.

“I never liked Monty Python so I probably won’t like Spamalot.”

Remember the first time you tried liver? Or asparagus? OK, bad examples. But just like you didn’t have to be Jewish to eat Arnold’s Jewish Rye, you don’t have to be a stuffy, upper-class twit or even a drunken rugby fan to enjoy Spamalot.

“Taste is the enemy of art altogether. I’ve thought about this a lot. People with good taste are constantly worrying about what other people will think. Don’t put that couch over there! It’s the wrong thing to be thinking about because it squashes expression. Of life and vitality of all kinds, and sex – all the funny things!” —Spamalot director, Mike Nichols, New York Magazine

“I haven’t seen the movie so I won’t get the jokes.”

Please note that the Broadway musical Spamalot is only a partial rip-off of the spectacularly low-budget film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This extravagantly over budget musical, on the other hand, features a chorus of hunky men and sexy dancing girls, eye-popping sets, lavish costumes, plenty of new songs and several (extremely tasteful) potshots at theatrical institutions like Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Les Misérables.

“Comedy is about reminding us of the truth of being human: we all have a body and we all must die, and it is okay.” —Eric Idle, BBC News Online

“I can’t take my mom/daughter/sister to Spamalot. It’s really a guy show.”

OK, so your sons and husbands and uncles and grandfathers may know some of the lines by heart already, but Spamalot is so much more than fart jokes and dismembered knights. How about Tony Award-winning direction from Mike Nichols, director of The Birdcage, Working Girl and The Graduate. How about Tony-nominated choreography from Casey Nicholaw of this season’s The Drowsy Chaperone?

“But the Pythons didn’t write good parts for women because they were public schoolboys not used to dealing with ladies.” —The “Seventh Python,” Carol Cleveland, actress in most Python programs/movies/stage shows

Monty Python’s Spamalot plays Denver’s Buell Theatre March 28-30. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll free 800.641.1222; TTY 303.893.9582.

…So don’t take our word for it – take theirs!

Other Desert Cities: Dysfunction with a Twist

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:47:40 -0600

Other Desert Cities delivers many surprises.

One of them changes the game.

You’ve heard the adage: Don’t let a good deed go unpunished.

That seems to have been the state of mind of Jon Robin Baitz when he was unceremoniously thrown off the successful ABC-TV series, “Brothers and Sisters,” a show he had created and for whose success he was largely responsible as a writer/producer.

The parting was rancorous. It was a Hollywood mess Baitz was stewing about in such a dark mood that he promptly set about doing what writers do: find another writing project to absorb all those annoying feelings as he sat down to write Other Desert Cities. Rancor with humor to the rescue, plus a few other emotions that were exactly what the doctor ordered.

Other Desert Cities also happens to be a play about brothers and sisters—only more so. It’s about family (not to be confused with a family play). Like all families, this one has its joys, pleasures, angers, trivia, eccentricities, good will, irritations and secrets. It has a father, the retired star of some second-tier films and other sundries who plays golf a lot and lives in Palm Springs; it has a mother who used to write second-string films and is now a cheery career advice-giver; it has a semi-witty, semi-conscious sister-in-law, fresh out of rehab and good with zingers; it has a compliant son, a successful producer of reality TV; finally, it has the main ingredient—a rebellious daughter, a novelist with one book to her credit and, in her suitcase, one that is about to be published.

In short, it is a family like every other, except that this daughter is on the verge of committing a cardinal family sin. She has come to Palm Springs from her home in New York for the holidays, but the spicy new memoir taking up room in her luggage may blow up the family by revealing a long-buried family tragedy. Happy New Year, everyone.

This may not sound wildly original so far, but Baitz is no second-hand Johnny. He keeps the suspense cooking to a peak of sizzle until, inevitably, the meat of this story emerges bruised, charred and surprisingly tasty.

Question of the day: what exactly is it that makes dysfunctional people, betrayers of one another, so endlessly interesting on stage? Couldn’t we just as easily sit at home and ponder on their alter-egos, all of whom seem to be roosting somewhere in our own extended family tree? Do we really need to pay good money to watch a crisis on display? What makes these characters deliver such lip-smacking theatre?

The short answer is the Gossip Factor. GF for short.

The long answer? Really now, what would there be to say about a perfectly happy family? Not even enough for a 30-minute one-act. Have you ever seen the life and times of a happy family make the evening news? “Went on a great picnic today…” Without conflict or mystery, without some major confrontation or scary, unsolvable issue, no black sheep, no 11-o’clock speech, without the gossip who wants to listen?

The GF is the lubricant—the acid that drives the drama. It drove Hamlet to create situations that resulted in six members of the Danish court dead, himself included. The consequences of King Lear’s actions are not pretty either—torture, bad behavior, lust, madness, poisonings, deaths. O’Neill’s Tyrone family is spooked by drugs, alcohol and unhappiness in that very Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Arthur Miller’s salesman goes to an early grave, and his son to a life of perpetual failure, while King Oedipus faces misery, self-inflicted blindness and exile. August: Osage County? The geography may be different, but there’s another family gone fearfully awry.

All these folks are not having fun, but for some reason we are. Our emotions are given a real workout, which is what emotions are for. We can feel these people’s pain and simultaneously be relieved and happy that it’s happening to them and not us. That’s the dynamic. It’s why we’re mesmerized by murders, hurricanes, tsunamis, road kill and other such carnage. Besides, Baitz, an expert in the field, has provided not only characters that are interesting to listen to and watch, but also characters that turn out to be considerably less predictable than their literary forbears. That may be the best news of all about Other Desert Cities, because that particular endgame is, indeed, a fresh one.

It will not be revealed here. (What would be the point of seeing the play if we were to tell you the most remarkable thing about it?)

Suffice it to know that Baitz has pretty much outdone his predecessors. He has bested them by showing that real life—plays of this nature are always based on real life—is more complex, more interesting and a lot more bewildering than the history of the theatre (so far) might have led you to believe. Which brings us to the most important element the playwright has injected into his play: a strong dose of the unexpected.

When you combine shock, intelligence, humor and unpredictability you get a combustible situation that gives Other Desert Cities its theatrical edge. It also happens to be well written. There is tragedy at the root of this tale elegantly disguised as comedy, and the characters that inhabit this large, sunny living room are skilled at papering over their concerns with wisecracks and minutiae. The veneer of respectability they’ve shouldered for so many years is a gleaming suit of armor with which to stave off the inquiring world. It masks what they want no one to see and what they would rather not remember, even if it is the proverbial elephant in the room. But when that privacy is threatened from within, they defend it with a core of dignity (and a long-buried kernel of truth) that one might not have thought possible.

That is the gold that Baitz delivers—the fun part, the sadness, the fix and the demystification. It lifts the play onto another, more complex plane. At that elevation there is a silence and a giddiness that an audience may not have foreseen—and it is neither the road to Mecca nor the path to hell.

Other Desert Cities plays Denver’s Space Theatre March 29-April 28, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100 or 800.641.1222.

Seeing Blue

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:00:35 -0600

Those blue guys are not aliens; they’re members of Blue Man Group, bringing their energy and enigma to Denver

It’s 10 minutes to show time at a performance of Blue Man Group, and the noise in the theatre is so loud that the audience seems more like a group of revelers at a party than spectators in a theatre. People are boisterous, anticipation is high, the buzz is electric. By the time the Blue Men appear, the audience is screaming with delight.

It’s a scene repeated most nights in New York, Boston, Chicago, Orlando, Vegas and wherever Blue Man Group is appearing. How often do you see theatre audiences so revved up at the end of most shows, let alone before one has even begun? The decibel level rises as the evening goes on. By the end, the atmosphere is euphoric.

The Blue Man Group experience is unique and not confined to the United States. There are or have been productions in Tokyo, Toronto, and numerous European cities including Berlin, London, and Amsterdam. Millions of people of all ages and nationalities have seen the show, and countless numbers are repeat visitors. Although the off-Broadway production has been around since 1991, the demand for it is still strong and Blue Man Group has heeded the call with this, its first national tour—a tour that features a combination of the Blue Men’s most popular pieces with fresh material created exclusively for this iteration.

Why all the excitement?

It’s impossible to say exactly. Blue Man Group is totally off the grid—a contemporary comedic piece, performed by three silent, bald-and-blue characters who engage in a variety of set pieces ranging from primitive to sophisticated that combine music, comedy, science, technology and mind-boggling creativity. Just as in old-time vaudeville, they have something for everyone.

“We’ve done surveys to figure out who our audience is, and we’ve found that our demographic ranges from eight to 85 years old,” says Puck Quinn, creative director of character development and appearances. “That’s when we know we’re doing something right. A kid can come to the show and just enjoy the rhythm or the mess or the colors or the spectacle. Adults can come and do the exact same thing, but they might also come away with something to think about. When we do our work well, the show succeeds on multiple levels.”

Amid the riot of colors and music, the eating and flying food, are the LED screens displaying sometimes silly, sometimes witty, sometimes thought-provoking messages. There also is a sonorous pre-recorded voice guiding the audience through clever set pieces about a variety of topics such as modern plumbing, technology and choreography.

But the Blue Man Group show is mostly visual and aural—as opposed to oral. The Men are mute by choice. Language is not an issue, so the show travels well to other countries. Beating paint-covered drums and creating cascades of color has visceral appeal in any culture, and the “feast”—in which a member of the audience joins the Blue Men onstage to dine on… a Twinkie—retains its humor and sweetness wherever it plays.

“I think the reason the show works goes back to our ideas about the character,” says Phil Stanton, co-founder of Blue Man Group with Matt Goldman and Chris Wink all those years ago. “It might sound heady to talk about it this way, but the Blue Man is a kernel of humanity or a kind of Everyman. The blue paint gets rid of race and nationality.”

Adds Quinn: “The show deals with topics and issues that are common to every culture: Communication. Sensory overload. Beating music and heavy rhythm. Dancing. All of that crosses every border. We have things that we want to say, and the message is there if you want to hear it, but we don’t care if you don’t. We just want everyone to have fun.”

The relationship between the Blue Men and the audience is the most intriguing part of this phenomenon. The audience could be considered an additional—and unpredictable—character. It’s not just that a woman from the audience is selected to appear onstage each night to partake in the “feast,” or that a man is chosen to get “Jelloed” (a new verb?) or that viewers in the first few rows are so close to the action that they’re given ponchos to wear in case paint or other stuff lands on them. It’s that the audience response catalyzes the Blue Men. That symbiosis is what fuels the passions of the show’s devoted fans.

“The relationship with the audience is everything,” underscores Matt Goldman, “because at the end of the day, the Blue Man is really just trying to connect. He knows, either intellectually or at gut level, that in order to get to that ecstatic, heightened moment, he must connect with these strangers. That’s why the Blue Man is so respectful [of his viewers]. He wants their trust. It’s all about connection.”

Clearly, Blue Man Group is connecting. Stanton recalls a man who saw the show 70 times (“he wasn’t a weirdo”) and others who’ve seen it 20 or 30 times. “Usually, if people see a play they liked, they’ll tell their friends to go see it,” says Quinn, “but with our show, people want the experience of seeing it with their friends. And that creates energy and intensity from the start…. It’s not a passive experience. It’s more like going to a sporting event.

“I tell people that you don’t really start seeing the layers of the onion peeled back until you see the show for the second or third time. I also think people come back for very specific reasons: they want to really listen to the music or pay attention to a particular moment because they couldn’t quite figure out how it was done. And they come back because they want to see how the show is different from night to night. The other thing is, we change the show. Every couple of years we swap out a whole bunch of material. We want it to be relevant to time and period.”

The national tour should only expand Blue Man Group’s fan base and recidivists will discover a performance quite different from its predecessors.

“We are going to be in large theatres, and that was one of the main impulses for finding another way to deliver a lot of the content,” says Stanton. “We have a new set design, with LED surfaces and LED curtains. It gives the show a completely different look. And we’ve found that we can use the technology to help people focus more.”

The finale—one of Blue Man Group’s most celebrated hallmarks—is now completely new; replacing it, its creators say, took guts.

“We always wanted the show to feel like it was working toward that moment, that ending, when all the things that make us fragmented in the modern world go away and we become one group,” says Stanton. “It’s hinted at in certain places during the show, and that’s what the arc of the evening is about: two cultures encountering each other and realizing by the end that there are no barriers between them….

“There aren’t many places where you can be with strangers and have this shared experience. The new finale has a similar concept, and the same goal: to make the audience look around and encounter other people. Visually, we’re taking it to another level. We hope audiences will find it even more powerful.”

Blue Man Group plays Denver’s Buell Theatre April 12-21, 2013. Tickets: 303.893.4100; Toll free 800.641.1222 or TTY 303.893.9582.

Material for this article is courtesy of the Blue Man Group website.

Hal Holbrook Tonight!

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:00:29 -0600

By Sylvie Drake

For nearly 60 years, he’s usurped Mark Twain’s persona as his mantle and Twain’s perspicacity as his rapier. Both still apply.

Did you know…. that actor Hal Holbrook was a member of the first Lincoln Center Repertory Company (1963), did a whole lot of regional theatre, film and TV, won numerous Emmys, including one for his role as host and narrator of Portrait of America, a five-year cable TV project that garnered the 1984 Peabody?

Of course not.

You and the world inevitably think of Hal Holbrook primarily as Mark Twain, thanks to his irrepressible solo performance in Mark Twain Tonight!, a now legendary characterization of the 19th century humorist and writer that grew out of a post-World War II honors project at Ohio’s Denison University.

That should give you some idea of how long Holbrook’s been spreading Twain’s gospel to an ever-renewing public eager to listen.

To hear Holbrook tell it, this was all an accident. Born in Cleveland in 1925 where his first role in the theatre was in The Man Who Came to Dinner at Cleveland’s Cain Park Theatre, he grew up in Massachusetts. He and his two sisters were reared there by their grandparents (and assorted boarding schools) after their mother, a dancer in vaudeville and musical comedy, disappeared when her children were little, and their father did a similar vanishing act soon after.

By the time Holbrook left Denison, he was married and he and his first wife, Ruby Johnson, had developed a two-person show consisting of characters from Shakespeare to (yes) Mark Twain. They took it on the road, touring the 8am school assembly circuit in a freezing Southwest, doing 307 shows in 30 weeks, and racking up 30,000 miles on their station wagon, with costumes that often had to be defrosted before they could be worn.

The Twain characterization might have perished right there, but Holbrook was cast in a soap opera in New York and became sufficiently bored with it that he began to expand his repertoire of Twain material in sheer self-defense. When TV’s Ed Sullivan saw the polished oneman piece in a small New York theatre and offered Holbrook national exposure on his hugely popular variety show, there was no turning back.

The down side of that success was that young Hal was being offered mostly old-man roles. The up side, though he didn’t know it at the time, was that Mark Twain Tonight! would become the singular, solo creation that he’s played all over the country (including Broadway, where it earned him a 1966 Tony® Award) that would keep rewarding him—artistically, emotionally, financially—for the rest of his life. It is a lasting achievement without equal.

This turn of events threatened, but was not allowed to impede a much richer and fuller career. On stage he tackled everything—from comedy to drama, musicals to Chekhov, Miller to Shakespeare, careening from Hotspur and Shylock to the vaulting King Lear, without flinching at the sheer magnitude and range of his undertakings.

“I was introduced to acting that way, playing everything” he told this writer in 1996, when he came through Denver in the title role of Death of a Salesman. (His most recent film achievement is playing Francis Preston Blair in Spielberg’s Lincoln.)

“I dove into the theatre to get behind disguises,” he confessed. “As a kid, I’d scare the neighborhood as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. If I’d learned just to play myself I might have become some kind of movie star, but I thwarted that by taking on roles that allowed me to get at the heart of a character.

“In the theatre, when you deal with the literature, you learn to inhabit those amazing characters.”

Yet the most amazing of those characters remains his portrayal of the pugnacious, cigar-chomping Mark Twain, a wit and writer Holbrook deeply admires and with whom he is on very intimate terms after almost 60 years of being him on stage. Not only does he find Twain’s perceptions brilliant, but also extremely modern. He has taken Twain’s writings—paragraphs, lines and sentences—to create an ever-changing, revolving-door script. By changing the words he chooses to say from one performance to the next, Holbrook enlivens the event and keeps it fresh.

When we met on a wintry Los Angeles afternoon in his home library recently, Holbrook was fired up. On cue, eyes, energy and indignation blazing, he expounded not only on the astonishing career he has made out of playing one of America’s greatest citizen-philosophers (a journey now chronicled in his 2011 autobiography, Harold, the Boy Who Became Mark Twain), but also on his boundless admiration for what he sees as Twain’s prophetic vision of this country’s often rogue and difficult trajectory and uncertain future.

“He was the first tremendously successful author in this country,” he said. “In the 1870s, after the Civil War, his career took off, he came east, and the country took off. The Industrial Revolution began, fed by Mr. Lincoln saying go ahead, put down the transcontinental railroad. Mark Twain, still in his thirties, became the confidant of Andrew Carnegie, of Mr. Vanderbilt—he sailed on his yacht—of young John Rockefeller, of every single one of these people: [Jay] Gould, J.P. Morgan.

“In those days, no TV, so they all belonged to clubs, the Players Club, the Lotus Club. They all knew each other, had lunches, made fun of each other, had fun with each other. Twain watched them, looked at them, went home and wrote about them. He saw the great turn that had happened in this country, from an agrarian to an industrialized nation, which became, in a period of 30 or 40 years, an industrial giant.

“I am putting in a new piece of material,” he announced with unconcealed fanfare. “This is a quote: ‘We can’t get out of it now. No mistake. We are the kind of world power that a prairie-dog village is, and our government must stand sentinel on top of our little world-power mound and, with lifted nose, solemn face and curved paws, look out over the vast prairie. And if we see anything that doesn’t look right, because we’re a world power and our civilization is wonderful in many spectacular ways…’ ”

The rest of this quote throws down a gauntlet to an America Twain presciently saw as having lost its way. “ ‘It’s a civilization,’ ” the quote sums up, that “ ‘has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life, its poetry, its soft romantic dreams and visions, and replaced them with a money fever, shorted ideals, vulgar ambitions and a sleep that does not refresh.’ ” No wonder Holbrook stands in awe.

“You could start the American Dream with Abraham Lincoln as the epitome of the Great American Story,” he said. “You go from Lincoln to Twain and the disintegration that he began to write about in The Gilded Age and other late works, and you know he was beginning to see the erosion of the purity of our values.

“If you think that Mark Twain was just becoming a road exercise for me, think again,” he added. “It’s the only way that I am able to get rid of my anger and frustration. I can get out there and say something that means something to me and, I believe, to the American public that may not even understand the magnitude of what is going on. It’s become my sword. We all need to think a little bit about what we are doing to ourselves, to our children and especially to our country.”

The words will be Twain’s. The passion? All Holbrook.

Mark Twain Tonight! plays Denver’s Buell Theatre March 16 only. Tickets: 303.893.4100, Toll-free 800.641.1222 or TTY 303.893.9582.

This article originally appeared in Applause magazine.

Frank Abagnale Jr.: The Real Story Behind Catch Me If You Can

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:00:37 -0700

Frank Abagnale Jr. is an expert on fraud, scams, deception and beating the system. Between the ages of 16 and 21, he forged and cashed $2.5 million worth of bad checks in the United

States and 26 other countries, while successfully passing himself off as an airline pilot for Pan Am, a doctor, a college professor and a lawyer. He was ultimately caught, as he always knew he would be, and served time in French, Swedish and American prisons.

Abagnale’s adventures were immortalized, and somewhat fictionalized, in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo DiCaprio starring as the young con man and Tom Hanks playing the FBI agent who pursued him. The movie, based on a ghost-written autobiography, inspired a 2011 Broadway musical of the same name – score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, book by Terrence McNally, direction by Jack O’Brien and choreography by Jerry Mitchell – which is now touring the country.

It’s easy to understand why great storytellers have been attracted to this period in Abagnale’s life. His capers were colorful, improbable, glamorous, ingenious and exciting. With each chase, with each con, there also was the element of suspense: Would he get away with it? How would he get away with it? It’s a tale that practically begged to be told on screen and on stage.

Abagnale’s life on the lam is the most entertaining part of his story – but it’s not the best part of his story. It may not even be the most remarkable part of his story. What Abagnale has done since leaving behind his life of crime is both mind-boggling and inspiring. He has used his knowledge as a counterfeiter and scam artist to stop criminals and protect law-abiding citizens, initially working with the FBI – which was part of his parole agreement – and then by developing a host of fraud prevention programs that are used by more than 14,000 financial institutions, corporations and law enforcement agencies. “Those are the amazing things to me about my life,” he says, “not what I did so many years ago.”

He didn’t set out to be a con artist when he ran away from home to New York City following his parents’ divorce. “It started out as survival,” he says. “I was 16 and tried to get jobs working in a store, like a delivery boy, and I realized they weren’t going to pay me anything. I knew I looked older, and I thought that if I lied about my age, if people thought I was ten years older, they’d pay me more.”

But as the film and musical indicate, Abagnale was resourceful and very smart, and he began to figure out ways – none of them legal – to make great sums of money, more than he ever dreamed. “I’ve always said that the two reasons for my success were that I was very creative and very observant,” he says. “I saw things that no one paid attention to. I was able to look at things and figure out ways around them. I think I got away with a lot of things because I was an adolescent; I had no fear of being caught. And like most adolescents, I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.”

He didn’t have nearly as much fun as the Frank Abagnale of stage and screen. “It’s a very lonely life,” he says. “Everyone you meet thinks you’re somebody else. I couldn’t confide in anybody. I was this teenage boy out on his own, and I cried myself to sleep many nights. Everyone I associated with thought I was their peer, but they were ten years older than I. So I was constantly having to act like an adult.

“I was also being chased, and I knew I had to stay one step ahead,” he continues. “At one point it became a game between me and the FBI agent as to who was going to outsmart who. But you grow up and mature and you realize you don’t want to live the rest of your life like that. I always knew I’d get caught: I didn’t have it in me to give myself up, but I knew it was a matter of time before they would catch up with me. And there’s great relief when you’re caught because it’s over. When I look back on my life, even knowing where it has brought me, I would never want to have to live that over again.”

Abagnale was 21 years old and living under an assumed name in France when the French police caught him and imprisoned him for six months under horrific conditions. He then spent six months in a Swedish jail, and was subsequently deported to the United States. Before American authorities could take him into custody he ran away again, escaping through the service area of the plane – not by disemboweling a plane’s toilet, as in the movie. “I was desperate, but not that desperate,” he says. He was desperate because he was terrified. “I thought I might go to prison for 20 years or for the rest of my life. Having experienced prison, I got very scared, and that’s why I tried to escape. I had no idea whether American prisons were like French prisons.”

He was eventually caught and sentenced to 12 years in jail. But after four years he was paroled, on the condition that he would use his expertise teaching and working undercover for the FBI. “I didn’t come out of prison saying, ‘I’m a changed person, I will never do this again,’” he says. “The truth is that this was a way to get my freedom. I didn’t know what I would do, or whether I would go straight.”

It was during one of his undercover assignments that Abagnale met Kelly, the woman who would become his wife. “She was working on her master’s degree, writing a paper and doing an internship at this institution where I was undercover,” he says. “I met her under this phony name, and started dating her. On my last day, I took her to the park and said, ‘I would really like to continue to see you, but I have to explain that I’m not this person, this is not what I do for a living. I work for the government and I’ve been here on assignment.’ I broke protocol, which you’re never supposed to do. But she listened to me, and she literally changed my life. She believed in me, she had faith in me, and she married me against the wishes of her parents, who eventually came to love me. She saw something in me that other people probably never saw. She gave me three beautiful children. I am who I am and I am and where I am because of the love of a woman, and the respect three sons have for their father. “

With Kelly in his life, Abagnale’s redemption truly began. When his obligation to the FBI was completed, he was asked to remain on. “I didn’t want to stay on as an employee of the government, because there were things I wanted to do that I’d be restricted from doing, like writing books and educating people about crime,” he says. “I also had a lot of technology ideas that I wanted to develop, but I knew that if I did them while working for the government, the technology would become government property.” So he became a contract employee, working as a consultant and teaching at the FBI Academy – where one of his students was his oldest son, now an FBI agent.

Abagnale works with the FBI to this day, and became lifelong friends with the agent who relentlessly pursued him, Joseph Shea – known as Carl Hanratty in the movie and the musical – who died in 2005. He has his own business, Abagnale & Associates, a security consulting firm, and is considered to be a leading authority in the field. He is a dynamic, much sought-after lecturer, and a self-made millionaire – legitimately. Just as surprising, he serves on the advisory board of Wild Wings International, the philanthropic organization of former Pan Am flight attendants. “Who would have dreamed that?” he says. “Only in America could something like this happen.”

Yet he lives with his past everyday. And although three presidents have offered to pardon him, he has turned them down. “I respectfully declined,” he says, “because I truly believe that a piece of paper cannot excuse my actions. I don’t think it works that way. I made some mistakes in my life and I have to live with them. I know people are fascinated by what I did between the ages of 16 and 21. But what amazes me is where my life went when I came out of prison. I try to do the right thing, and I hope that in the end I’ll be judged for that.”

Catch Me if You Can plays Denver’s Buell Theatre Feb 26-March 10. Tickets: 303.893.4100.

2013 Colorado New Play Summit – Post #5

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:44:16 -0700

Karen Zacarías’ adaptation of Helen Thorpe’s best selling book, Just Like Us, rounds out the Denver Center Theatre Company’s eighth annual Colorado New Play Summit.

Based on the true story of four Latina high school students, this timely and relevant look at what it means to be undocumented in America played to an enthusiastic audience of industry insiders.

The girls — two documented and two not — discover how their opportunities differ as they move through high school, college and into the world. Their close-knit friendship is jeopardized when opportunities open or close for each girl according to her immigration status.

When a political firestorm arises in the wake of the shooting of a policeman, their situations are thrown into even bolder relief. Punctuated by notable politicians, outspoken critics of undocumented aliens, and vocal proponents of immigration reform, this play grapples with some essential questions: Who is an American? Who gets to live in America? What happens when we don’t agree?

The 2013 Colorado New Play Summit runs February 8-10, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. To view an interview with the playwright, visit: http://youtu.be/aNVGSVBGM8U

2013 Colorado New Play Summit – Post #4

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:34:59 -0700

Picture this: You’re living paycheck to paycheck. Your wife tells you she’s pregnant. Your landlord is threatening eviction. Your job as an Elvis impersonator gets ripped out from under you. Your only life preserver is stepping into the role of a drag queen.

You’ve just entered Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride, the fourth reading at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s eighth annual Colorado New Play Summit.

Beaten down by bad decisions and bad timing, Casey is despondent, stating “being good at something doesn’t mean you can make a living at it.” But when circumstances literally thrust opportunity upon him, he listens to Miss Tranny Mills who says, “Daddy makes money. Baby coming. Daddy puts on funny clothes. Sends baby to Harvard.” Casey soon steps into his high heels, dons his wig and steps into the spotlight.

This joyous, bawdy comedy with a ton of music and great big heart was complemented by audience outbursts, guffaws, catcalls and everything but “Hallelujah brother”…or sister, whichever blows your skirt up and makes you happy.

The 2013 Colorado New Play Summit runs February 8-10, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. To view an interview with the playwright, visit: http://youtu.be/w3rUIuk20Z8

2013 Colorado New Play Summit - Post #3

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 15:13:00 -0700

Day two of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s eighth annual Colorado New Play Summit heated up just as the snow began to fall. An ensemble of six actors brought to comical life Catherine Trieschmann’s The Most Deserving.

Tasked with awarding $20,000 to a deserving and needy local artist who “demonstrates an underrepresented American voice,” a small town arts council in Ellis County, Kansas erupts into chaos. The collision of egos pushes aside the valuation of art based on merit as the local art council president refuses to consider an unconventional, ethnic artist whose religious art is made out of trash.

Sage philanthropist Edie observes that she “did not match the living fund grant so that everyone could act out their personal grievances,” but grieve they do. Liz, who holds a PhD in art history, teaches at the local community council and is a self-appointed advocate for the mentally-unstable African-American artist, challenges the nay sayers by questioning, “Isn’t great art supposed to provoke?” and is soundly refuted by Arts Council President Jolene who responds, “Not in Kansas.”

This satirical, insightful look at how the arts collide with politics, self-interest, taste, relationships, egos and gossip is ripe with one-liners, memorable dialogue and a fundamental question — how do you place a value on art?

The 2013 Colorado New Play Summit runs February 8-10, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. To view an interview with the playwright, visit: http://youtu.be/zOA-wQfzNvc

2013 Colorado New Play Summit – Post #2

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:34:35 -0700

Denver Center commissioned playwright Marcus Gardley regaled and moved a standing-room-only crowd at the eighth annual Colorado New Play Summit.

The 200+ guests were drawn into his play, black odyssey, a magical retelling of Homer’s Odyssey told through the African American experience.

The great Greek archetypes blend myth and history into modern reality as the characters slip and slide through time. Great Grand Daddy Deus masterfully manipulates the players while Great Aunt Tina intervenes to protect Ulysses from his vengeful Uncle Sidin.

Ripped apart by war, Nella Pee and Ulysses seek to reunite while moving through the rough streets of Harlem, the Iran/Iraq war, the Civil Rights Movement and the rift between the North and the South. The audience is draw through time as the cast weaves together fact and fiction to create a fabric that is a vibrant retelling of Zeus, Poseidon and Ulysses.

Nella and Ulysses move separately through the play but on parallel journeys as they flee to escape persecution and run toward salvation — the salvation found in peace, family and love.

The 2013 Colorado New Play Summit runs February 8-10, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. To view an interview with the playwright, visit: http://youtu.be/ko7cG-GJDsA