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mrs-stans · 2 months ago

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Sebastian Stan describes the 'big reactions' from New Yorkers over his A Different Man transformation: 'I was terrified'

The actor and makeup artist extraordinaire Mike Marino unpack Stan's dramatic prosthetics turn.

By Nick Romano

Sebastian Stan was so determined to work with Oscar-nominated makeup artist Mike Marino on his film A Different Man that the actor was willing to undergo a social and professional experiment.

As Edward, the 42-year-old Marvel star would play an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, or NF1 for short, who undergoes an experimental procedure that radically changes his face, only to then emotionally spiral out of control when he loses the part he was born to play to Oswald (Adam Pearson), someone with NF1 who lives a much fuller life than Edward ever led, pre- or post-procedure. Stan needed the man who made Colin Farrell unrecognizable as Oz Cobb for The Batman and HBO’s The Penguin to pull off such a feat.

Since Marino was already busy on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Stan walked the few blocks from his apartment in New York City’s SoHo district to Marino’s home every morning around 4 or 5 a.m. “Then you just wait till they're ready for you on set,” Marino remembers saying to him. On some of those days, Stan would kill time by wandering Manhattan in full makeup until his call time. “I walked up and down Broadway, basically,” Stan, sitting in the New York offices of studio A24, tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a busy street. I was terrified, but I would just go get a coffee or sit.”

Sebastian Stan is unrecognizable as an actor with facial deformity in trailer for A Different Man

Stan doesn’t consider himself to be a physical actor, and yet his body of work might suggest differently. Even when the costume shoulders the bulk of the transformation, such as playing Tommy Lee in Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, his body language molds to match the look. That skill is especially prominent in A Different Man (playing now in limited release). “Even alone, being able to only look out of one eye and then having one ear more covered immediately changes a lot,” he says of Marino's makeup effects. “It changes how you stand. It changes how far away you are from people, how you look at people. I felt oddly on my back foot more. It's a defensive reaction because you want to be prepared in case something's coming, that you have enough time to react.”

“What we get is such an incredibly passionate, skilled actor that can hide within a true character,” Marino tells EW in a separate conversation on Zoom from his SoHo apartment, part of which serves as the mini studio where Stan’s makeup application occurred. “He would actually now have a chance to live with people's reactions and how they were treating him.”

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That experience informed Stan’s entire performance, and it became important for him to do so, even outside of the mornings' wait time. He would often stroll away from set on the Upper West Side in between breaks or setups. “New York is pretty evolved in a lot of ways, but I still got some big reactions from people,” he recalls. “Like, ‘Oh s---!’ ‘Oh f---!’ ‘Look at that!’ It was scary to experience. It was hard to experience. I felt powerless in those situations in some way. And, I guess, a lot of that is how Edward feels in the film.”

Sebastian Stan transforms in the discomforting drama A Different Man

Other reactions were less intense, but equally informative. While standing at a stoplight, for instance, Stan noticed the difference between those pedestrians avoiding eye contact completely, compared to those trying to discreetly steal a look or offer him a forced smile — all bystander reactions that director Aaron Schimberg incorporates into the movie. "I don't think it always comes from a bad place," he says. "Sometimes people just want to connect or feel okay. It's actually about their own experience. It's not even about you. It's like they're in that moment feeling something that's funny to them and they're trying to deal with it. They don't know how."

Marino wanted to be involved with A Different Man thanks to his love of the 1980 film The Elephant Man, loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who lived with a facial disfigurement. As a 5-year-old, the movie scared Marino. But as he fell in love with the art of makeup transformations on screen, he came to see it for what it was: "a beautiful" and "touching story," he describes. "That really made an indelible mark on my life."

He would need that motivation for the obstacles that Stan's look on A Different Man prompted. "There were many technical challenges," he recalls. "It is very difficult to do makeup that thick where they have very thick areas. So I had to really balance what was too big, what was too small. I still need the movement of Sebastian to come through. I still need his own face to drive the makeup and not have it look purely like a mask. I studied Adam's photos. I really analyzed him and tried to balance how I can make it work for Sebastian."

Sebastian Stan calls out journalist who refers to his new character with disfigurement as a 'beast'

Stan has another transformative part coming out soon, the buzzed-about and already-controversial performance of young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. Because he's now promoting both that film and A Different Man simultaneously, it's been interesting for him to think about the ways in which he approached both jobs.

"I've been finding strange parallels that I never really thought about," he remarks. "There's some similar themes being explored in terms of truth, self abandonment, denial of reality to some extent. I think these last couple of roles have required a different degree of physicality. One, obviously, is specific, a real person. But I think about that, of course. You have to, because everyone walks differently and everyone carries things in their body differently. Sometimes you gain access in a different way to things by simply changing a physical aspect of yourself."

The greatest compliment he received for that kind of work on A Different Man, even more than the glowing praise he's seen from the critics, came from Pearson's mother. "After she saw the film, she was like, 'All I ever wanted was for someone to walk in his shoes for one day, to know what it's like, and you were able to do that,'" Stan remembers of their exchange. "I came close to that, I guess, in a way, to feel that kind of invasiveness that he probably felt at some point in his life, walking around."

#Sebastian Stan #Entertainment Weekly #A Different Man #Mike Marino #Aaron Schimberg #Adam Pearson #A24 #Interview #mrs-stans

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judeiscactus · 7 months ago

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i did something a little silly

for those of you who have absolutely no clue what falsettos is (because im noticing that in the comments/reposts:

“Falsettos is a sung-through musical with a book by William Finn and James Lapine, and music and lyrics by Finn. The musical consists of March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), the last two installments in a trio of one-act musicals that premiered off-Broadway (the first was In Trousers). The story centers on Marvin, who has left his wife to be with a male lover, Whizzer, and struggles to keep his family together. Much of the first act explores the impact his relationship with Whizzer has had on his family. The second act explores family dynamics that evolve as he and his ex-wife plan his son's bar mitzvah, which is complicated as Whizzer comes down with an early case of AIDS. Central to the musical are the themes of Jewish identity, gender roles, and gay life in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” -Wikipedia

i created an AU where marvin would be aziraphale; crowley would be whizzer; gabriel would be trina; beelzebub would be mendel; muriel would be jason (i keep on teetering between them or adam); and the lesbians are the lesbians (because they’re literally the same people/hj)

this is the playbill for falsettos which is where i got the inspiration from

#good omens #cactusisgay #crowley #aziraphale good omens #aziraphale #falsettos au #good omens 2 #good omens au #muriel good omens #gabriel good omens #jim good omens #beelzebub good omens #nina good omens #maggie good omens #whizvin #aziracrow #falsettos #false omens????

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jgroffdaily · 2 months ago

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As the last of the families finished smiling and posing for photos with Jonathan Groff and Miss Amie Vanité (drag performer Christopher Paolini) after the second of two story hours at the Lancaster Convention Center Saturday afternoon — in support of Lancaster Pride and the Lancaster Public Library — the two had a few minutes to talk about the day, and Groff, a bit about his Tony Award experience and his career.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan, you’re here doing an event raising money for the Lancaster Public Library, as well as Lancaster Pride. Is there a book you’re reading, or have read recently, that you can recommend?

Miss Amie Vanité: He recommended I read Barbra’s book.

Jonathan Groff: That’s the one. Thank you! I am now over halfway through the audio book of “My Name is Barbra,” the Barbra Streisand memoir. I’ve gotten up to her directing “Yentl.” I was just listening to it yesterday while I was making dinner.

Which library did you go to as a child?

Groff: Lancaster Library and Strasburg Library. And the libraries in my elementary school, Smoketown [Elementary], and middle school. My library teacher was here today! Did you have a school library you went to, Miss Amie?

Miss Amie: I had a school library that I was in all the time. I went to the Reading Public Library and the Wyomissing Public Library.

Groff to Miss Amie: What was your favorite book that you read today [at the story hour]?

Miss Amie: That’s a toss-up between “If You Plant a Seed” [by Kadir Nelson] and “One Equals Many” [by Sonny Dean]. They’re so short, but they’re so poignant and so important.

Jonathan, you have been involved in Pride events in bigger cities. You were the grand marshal of the New York City Pride Parade (in 2014). This is your first event for Lancaster Pride ... .

Groff: This means more to me than anything I’ve ever done, at any Pride event. To be back in Lancaster, to be sitting next to Miss Amie. This combination of celebrating Pride and being in my hometown is unparalleled. It’s incredible.

Miss Amie: I was so blown away and excited that you wanted to come and do this and be a part of us here. It means the world.

Groff: To me, too.

Jonathan, a lot of the interviews you did with national media, leading up to the Tony Awards, seemed very introspective. You talked a lot about the 20 years since you moved to New York, and how your career has evolved since then. What did you learn from that?

Groff: It’s part of why I’m here right now. That opportunity of “Merrily [We Roll Along],” for the actors and the characters and also for the audience, was to really become introspective and look back on your life — things that worked out, things that didn’t work out, regrets, mistakes you’ve made, and when I read about what had happened in March with Miss Amie [the cancellation of the library story time and threats received], I was in the middle of the “Merrily” run. And I can’t believe I’ve done all of these gay events and I’ve never gone to my hometown. I’ve gone home to celebrate the theater, and the theaters I’ve worked at, but I’ve never gone purely for Pride. So, when this happened, and I was receiving these articles that my friends from home were sending me, it felt like such an obvious invitation to pick up the phone and call Lancaster Pride and Miss Amie, and make good on what happened in March.

Can you talk at all about what’s next for you, professionally? It was reported in Deadline and elsewhere that you were performing in an industry reading last month, of a musical about [1960s pop star and activist] Bobby Darin, called “Just In Time” [with the possibility of it being developed for Broadway. Groff had performed a Bobby Darin concert at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 2018].

Groff: Yes. We did that, and it went great. And it was really fun, and we’ll see what happens.

Has the type or volume of the [job] offers that you get changed since winning the Tony Award?

Groff: Yes. It’s more emails, more texts. It’s amazing.

I put Lancaster in the first sentence of my [Tony acceptance] speech because I love this city so much and I love this county so much, and I really prepared what I said in that moment, because I thought, if I get the chance to speak, I want to make sure I’m very intentional about every word that I’m saying. Because I’ve officiated five weddings now, and I started to, at the second and third wedding, comprehend the value of what you say when people are listening. And that goes from that moment, that opportunity I had to speak at the Tonys, all the way to this moment today with Miss Amie. It matters. It matters what we say and what we do, and it’s important to be intentional about those things. I learned that from that experience. And I’m feeling the ripple effects of that even months later

What was going through your mind between the time you heard your name called [as the Tony winner] and the time you got to the stage to make your speech?

Groff: I was really conscious of the people I was embracing. So I remember seeing my mom, my dad, my brother, our director, Maria [Friedman], who had just lost in her category ... and I lifted her up [off her feet]. Saw Dan [Radcliffe, his “Merrily” co-star], and then I remember thinking I have to get this out as fast as possible, because I have, I think, 45 seconds, and I wanted to say what’s in my heart. So that was the big goal.

Anything else you’re working on that you can talk about?

Groff: Unfortunately, I can’t. But when I can, I’ll let you know.

Is there any category of entertainment job — writing, directing, Shakespeare, a superhero film — that you’re especially anxious to explore?

Groff: I’m open to everything. Today it’s story time with Miss Amie.

#jonathan groff #interview #story time #lancaster #Bobby Darin project #just in time #merrily we roll along #daniel radcliffe

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themousefromfantasyland · 9 months ago

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A Fairy Tale Rabbit Hole

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the movie that it started it all for Disney Animation and it's the most influential fairy tale movie ever. Its tropes and its tone still inspires fairy tale media to this day, either as parodies, or homages.

But what less people know is that Walt Disney was inspired to make this movie because of a peculiar silent movie that he watched when he was a teenager.

That movie was Snow White from 1916. Its writer, Winthrop Ames, adapted it from his own Broadway play. An example of American fairy tale theater.

This kept me thinking.

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most iconic fantasy films of all time, and it was made in direct response to Snow White. What people don't know is that the scene where Glinda saves the gang from the deadly poppies with a snowstorm came straight from a fairy tale musical from 1902. It came from The Wizard of Oz, a fairy tale musical "extravaganza", with direct input from L. Frank Baum, only two years after the original novel.

Actually, stage musicals seem to take a slight part in the creation of Oz. The Marvellous Land of Oz, the sequel, seems to be inspired by this stage culture. General Jinjur and her army dresses like chorus girls, Ozma/Tip may be inspired by the crossdressing in children roles, and this was the book's dedication:

"To those excellent good fellows and comedians David C. Montgomery and Frank A. Stone whose clever personations of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have delighted thousands of children throughout the land, this book is gratefully dedicated by THE AUTHOR"

These were actors of the 1902 stage show.

Two years later, on 1904 Peter and Wendy premiered. This play is also one of the most famous children stories ever. Walt Disney himself acted as Peter in a local production of it and Tinkerbell quickly became a mascot for the studio.

This all led me to think more about fairy tale theater specifically.

Since the ending of the 18th century and through the 19th century, a genre of stage show developed through Europe. It was mostly comedic and light-hearted, mainly inspired by fairy tales, and it was geared towards children and families. It involved lavish fantasy spectacles told through operas, ballets, and what we today would call "musical theater".

It had many different names and variations depending on the country.

On England, it evolved through the pantomimes and it became a Christmas tradition.

In Russian, it was mainly through ballet, called the ballet-féerie, often considered a lower-class, more commercialized entertainment than traditional ballet. Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker are among some of them. Sleeping Beauty would later inspire Disney's telling of the story.

In France they were called Féerie, and it was a mix of music, dancing, pantomime, acrobatics, and stage effects. It influenced the development of burlesque, musical comedy and film.

From Wikipedia:

With his 1899 film version of Cinderella, Georges Méliès brought the féerie into the newly developing world of motion pictures. The féerie quickly became one of film's most popular and lavishly mounted genres in the early years of the twentieth century, with such pioneers as Edwin S. Porter, Cecil Hepworth, Ferdinand Zecca, and Albert Capellani contributing fairy-tale adaptations in the féerie style or filming versions of popular stage féeries like Le Pied de mouton, Les Sept Châteaux du diable, and La Biche au bois. The leader in the genre, however, remained Méliès,[37] who designed many of his major films as féeries and whose work as a whole is intensely suffused with the genre's influence.[38]

Once you realize a huge chunk of fairy tale media has roots in family friendly stage shows from 19th century, a lot of it started making sense.

The focus on romance, the focus on damsels in distress, prevalence of lighter tones, the everlasting connection to music and dance.

They may be the main reason why some fairy tales are more famous than others. Some became source material for a continuous stream of operas, operettas, musical extravaganzas, ballets, plays, and others simply not.

And besides the Victorian Era storybooks that bowdlerized fairy tales for children, I think this whole genre of the theater was responsible to firmly establish fairy tales as a child friendly media, decades before Disney ever released Snow White to cash in that nostalgia.

If you have something to add or if I just got something wrong, feel free to correct me.

@ariel-seagull-wings @princesssarisa @adarkrainbow @the-blue-fairie @theancientvaleofsoulmaking @natache @tamisdava2 @thealmightyemprex

#fairy tales #stage shows #ballet #opera #pantomime #19th century

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make-friends-with-the-rats · 3 months ago

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could we maybe see albert dasilva for the ask game? :]

ah yes, the ginger

How I feel about this character: Albert is my favorite ensemble newsie in livesies bar none. He is painfully relatable sometimes. I do have some conflicting feelings over the livesies/bway portrayal of his and Race's dynamic because I feel like they took 92sies Race's personality and split it into Race and Albert with Albert taking Race's more serious qualities in the stage adaptation, but I do enjoy Albert as a character and I hope someone gets the poor boy his leg of lamb.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: I believe in aroace Albert. So sorry.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: Race and Albert but also Crutchie and Albert, specifically in UKsies. I don't know, I just think they're neat and Newsies UK is so special to me. Just look at them and imagine the chaos:

My unpopular opinion about this character: This is going to upset possibly everyone in the entire world, but livesies/bway Albert needs some sleeves. This goes for all of the newsies in the stage/Broadway musical that are missing sleeves. I don't care what the reasoning behind the sleeveless undershirts and vest combo was there is absolutely no way anyone in 1899 would dress like that. Undershirts had long sleeves for one thing, and why would you wear your vest on top but no shirt?? I need answers and those boys need sleeves. Second, Albert is actually not named Albert. Albert is actually his newsie nickname. (I know I was just complaining about historical dress, and the timeline I'm proposing doesn't directly match up but bear with me.) Imagine one of the newsies reads an article about Albert Einstein and his genius work in physics and what said newsie gets from the article is basically, "wow this guy is smart, I bet he's a real wise-mouth" and then Albert gets his nickname as Albert as in Albert Einstein because it evolves from "okay Albert Einstein" when Albert is being a smart-aleck to "okay Albert" and is the equivalent of "no shit Sherlock" in newsie vernacular.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I honestly don't know that I would change anything about Albert as a character. Actually, you know what? What if Albert scabbed? As a treat.

Thank you for asking!

ask game

characters answered: David Jacobs, Jack Kelly, Blink and Skittery, Bumlets and Swifty, Sarah Jacobs, Specs and Dutchy, Les Jacobs, Crutchie, Snitch and Itey, Mush Meyers, Spot Conlon, Racetrack Higgins, Katherine Plumber, Snoddy, Barney Peanuts and Romeo, Glasses

#an ask!#newsies #livesies #newsies uk #albert dasilva

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meltthefrozenheart · 1 year ago

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FROZEN 3 and FROZEN 4 are both in development, and I can't wait!

The news sounded odd to me initially, I didn't expect anything like this from Disney Animation, but it became immediatly appealing the moment I realized the GREAT potential a double feature could have for the franchise, most importantly when Bob Iger specified “Jenn Lee, who created Frozen, the original Frozen, and Frozen 2 is hard at work with her team at Disney Animation on not one but actually two stories.”, which would mean:

More time to enstablish new elements, new characters, time to explore new lore and new places without the risk to rush everything;

A bigger story that can help flesh out our protagonists in their new roles, their new wants and changes they might face, considering how the F2 ending brought many new possibilities;

A narrative context where the new crysis (whatever it might be) could be explored even better, also allowing to maintain things in a complex prespective just as the Frozen movies like to do, where the matter of "good and evil" not at the center, and things are first of all deeply personal for the characters

It seems to me that Jennifer Lee always wanted to delve deeper into things, this is why the Broadway Musical was a perfect opportunity for her and the Lopez to expand the characters and flesh out things in the story, also adding new elements that would've been useful for F2.

And when they worked on Frozen 2, they built it as the "second part" of the story, reconnecting almost all the aspects of the sequel to the 1st movie, and the story was clearly meant to be BIGGER and longer compared to what we ended up having because of numerous issues and rewrites. J. Lee and C. Buck didn't want to introduce something that would feel just as "a new adventure", and more about the actual characters evolving, see what they left unresolved, breaking the "Happy ending" scenario of F1, which also led them to NOT give the new human characters (Mattias and the Northuldra) the same relevance given to Spirits of Nature, in order to remain focused on Elsa, Anna and the rest of the gang.

Now, Lee will most likely not direct or write these two new movies, but she is still directly involved, because it's both part of her job as CCO of Walt Disney Animation Studio and because Frozen is her (and Chris Buck) baby. It will be curious to discover with what idea Marc Smith came out with, but the fact he worked on the 1st Frozen as a storyboard artist and the became Director of Story for Frozen 2 says a lot about him and why Lee trusts him so much, and I'm sure they will follow the approach used with the 2nd movie and carry it on with 3 and 4. Numerous sagas used the two-parter approach, like the books adaptations of Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games series, or more "original cases" like Pirates of the Carribeans or what we are getting now with the animated Spiderverse movies (Across and Beyond). But I think the best similarity (and probably what led to this ambitious choice) is with Avengers Infinity War/Endgame, where the BIG FINALE gets developed in two movies.

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justforbooks · 26 days ago

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Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter known for his solo work and his collaborations with Art Garfunkel. He and his school friend Garfunkel, whom he met in 1953, came to prominence in the 1960s as Simon & Garfunkel. Their blend of folk and rock, including hits such as "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", "America" and "The Boxer", served as a soundtrack to the counterculture movement. Their final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970), is among the bestselling of all time.

As a solo artist, Simon has explored genres including gospel, reggae and soul. His albums Paul Simon (1972), There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973), and Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) kept him in the public eye and drew acclaim, producing the hits "Mother and Child Reunion", "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard", and "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover". Simon reunited with Garfunkel for several tours and the 1981 Concert in Central Park.

In 1986, Simon released his most successful and acclaimed album, Graceland, incorporating South African influences. "You Can Call Me Al" became one of Simon's most successful singles. Graceland was followed by The Rhythm of the Saints (1990), and a second Concert in the Park in 1991, without Garfunkel, which was attended by half a million people. In 1998, Simon wrote a Broadway musical, The Capeman, which was poorly received. In the 21st century, Simon continued to record and tour. His later albums, such as You're the One (2000), So Beautiful or So What (2011) and Stranger to Stranger (2016), introduced him to new generations. Simon retired from touring in 2018, but continued to record music. An album, Seven Psalms, was released in May 2023.

Simon is among the world's best-selling music artists. He has twice been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and has been the recipient of sixteen Grammy Awards, including three for Album of the Year. Two of his works, Sounds of Silence and Graceland, were inducted into the National Recording Registry for their cultural significance, and in 2007, the Library of Congress voted him the inaugural winner of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. He is a co-founder of the Children's Health Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides medical care to children.

In 2012, in an interview reprinted in American Songwriter, Simon discussed the craft of songwriting with music journalist Tom Moon and talked about the basic themes in his songwriting: love, family and social commentary, as well as messages of religion, spirituality and God. Simon explained how he wrote his songs. "The music always precedes the words. The words often come from the sound of the music and eventually evolve into coherent thoughts. Or incoherent thoughts. Rhythm plays a crucial part in the lyric-making as well. It's like a puzzle to find the right words to express what the music is saying."

When Simon moved to England in 1964, he met Kathleen Mary "Kathy" Chitty at the first English folk club he played, the Railway Inn Folk Club in Brentwood, Essex, where Chitty worked part-time selling tickets. She was 16 and he was 22 when they began a relationship. Later that year they visited the U.S. together, mainly touring by bus. Kathy returned to England and Simon followed some weeks later. When he returned to the U.S. with the growing success of "The Sounds of Silence", Kathy, who was quite shy, wanted no part in success and fame and they ended their relationship. She is mentioned by name in at least two of Simon's songs: "Kathy's Song" and "America". She is also referred to in "Homeward Bound" and "The Late Great Johnny Ace". There is a photo of Simon and Kathy together on the cover of Simon's 1965 album The Paul Simon Songbook.

Simon has been married three times, first to Peggy Harper in 1969. They had a son, Harper Simon, in 1972, and divorced in 1975, inspiring the song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover". Simon wrote about this relationship in the song "Train in the Distance" from his 1983 album Hearts and Bones. In the late 1970s, Simon lived in New York City next door to Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who has been described as Simon's "best friend" during the period.

He and Shelley Duvall lived together as a couple for two years until she introduced him to her friend Carrie Fisher. Simon and Fisher became a couple, and his second marriage, from 1983 to 1984, was to Fisher. He proposed to her after a New York Yankees game. The song "Hearts and Bones" was written about their time together, and the song "Graceland" is believed to be about seeking solace from the ending of the relationship by taking a road trip. A year after they divorced, Simon and Fisher resumed their relationship, which lasted for several years.

Simon married singer Edie Brickell on May 30, 1992. Brickell and Simon have three children, Adrian, Lulu, and Gabriel. On April 26, 2014, Simon and Brickell were involved in a domestic dispute. Each was issued a summons to appear in court on disorderly conduct charges.

All four of his children are now adults and are musicians.

Simon and his younger brother, Eddie Simon, founded the Guitar Study Center sometime before 1973. The Guitar Study Center became part of The New School in New York City, sometime before 2002.

Simon is an avid fan of the New York Rangers ice hockey team, the New York Knicks basketball team and the New York Yankees baseball team.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Paul Simon #famous birthdays

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eddie-redmayne-italian-blog · 7 months ago

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The Untold History of Cabaret: Revived and Kicking

As Broadway welcomes the ever-evolving musical, its star, Eddie Redmayne—along with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, and Sam Mendes—assess its enduring power.

As director Rebecca Frecknall was rehearsing a new cast for her hit London revival of Cabaret, the actor playing Clifford Bradshaw, an American writer living in Berlin during the final days of the Weimar Republic, came onstage carrying that day’s newspaper as a prop. It happened to be Metro, the free London tabloid commuters read on their way to work. The date was February 25, 2022. When the actor said his line—“We’ve got to leave Berlin—as soon as possible. Tomorrow!”—Frecknall was caught short. She noticed the paper’s headline: “Russia Invades Ukraine.”

Cabaret, the groundbreaking 1966 Broadway musical that tackles fascism, antisemitism, abortion, World War II, and the events leading up to the Holocaust, had certainly captured the times once again.

Back in rehearsals four months later, Frecknall and the cast got word that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. Every time she checks up on Cabaret, “it feels like something else has happened in the world,” she told me over coffee in London in September.

A month later, as Frecknall was preparing her production of Cabaret for its Broadway premiere, something else did happen: On October 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.

The revival of Cabaret—starring Eddie Redmayne as the creepy yet seductive Emcee; Gayle Rankin as the gin-swilling nightclub singer Sally Bowles; and Bebe Neuwirth as Fraulein Schneider, a landlady struggling to scrape by—opens April 21 at Manhattan’s August Wilson Theatre. It will do so in the shadow of a pogrom not seen since the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the shadow of a war between Israel and Hamas that continues into its fifth month, with the killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Nearly 60 years after its debut, Cabaret still stings. That is its brilliance. And its tragedy.

Redmayne has been haunted by Cabaret ever since he played the Emcee in prep school. “I was staggered by the character,” he says. “The lack of definition of it, the enigma of it.” He played the part again during his first year at Cambridge at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where nearly 3,500 shoestring productions jostle for attention each summer. Cabaret, performed in a tiny venue that “stank,” Redmayne recalls, did well enough that the producers added an extra show. He was leering at the Kit Kat Club girls from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m. and then from 11 p.m. till two in the morning. “You’d wake up at midday. You barely see sunshine. I just became this gaunt, skeletal figure.” His parents came to see him and said, “You need vitamin D!”

In 2021, Redmayne, by then an Oscar winner for The Theory of Everything and a Tony winner for Red, was playing the Emcee again, this time in Frecknall’s West End production. His dressing room on opening night was full of flowers. There was one bouquet with a card he did not have a chance to open until intermission. It was from Joel Grey, who originated the role on Broadway and won an Oscar for his performance alongside Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie. He welcomed the young actor “to the family,” Redmayne says. “It was an extraordinary moment for me.”

Cabaret is based on Goodbye to Berlin, the British writer Christopher Isherwood’s collection of stories and character studies set in Weimar Germany as the Nazis are clawing their way to power. Isherwood, who went to Berlin for one reason—“boys,” he wrote in his memoir Christopher and His Kind—lived in a dingy boarding house amid an array of sleazy lodgers who inspired his characters. But aside from a fleeting mention of a host at a seedy nightclub, there is no emcee in his vignettes. Nor is there an emcee in I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s hit 1951 Broadway play adapted from Isherwood’s story “Sally Bowles” from Goodbye to Berlin.

The character, one of the most famous in Broadway history, was created by Harold Prince, who produced and directed the original Cabaret. “People write about Cabaret all the time,” says John Kander, who composed the show’s music and is, at 96, the last living member of that creative team. “They write about Liza. They write about Joel, and sometimes about us [Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb]. None of that really matters. It’s all Hal. Everything about this piece, even the variations that happen in different versions of it, is all because of Hal.”

In 1964, Prince produced his biggest hit: Fiddler on the Roof. In the final scene, Tevye and his family, having survived a pogrom, leave for America. There is sadness but also hope. And what of the Jews who did not leave? Cabaret would provide the tragic answer.

But Prince was after something else. Without hitting the audience over the head, he wanted to create a musical that echoed what was happening in America: young men being sent to their deaths in Vietnam; racists such as Alabama politician “Bull” Connor siccing attack dogs on civil rights marchers. In rehearsals, Prince put up Will Counts’s iconic photograph of a white student screaming at a Black student during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. “That’s our show,” he told the cast.

A bold idea he had early on was to juxtapose the lives of Isherwood’s lodgers with one of the tawdry nightclubs Isherwood had frequented. In 1951, while stationed as a soldier in Stuttgart, Germany, Prince himself had hung around such a place. Presiding over the third-rate acts was a master of ceremonies in white makeup and of indeterminate sexuality. He “unnerved me,” Prince once told me. “But I never forgot him.”

Kander had seen the same kind of character at the opening of a Marlene Dietrich concert in Europe. “An overpainted little man waddled out and said, ‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,’ ” Kander recalls.

The first song Kander and Ebb wrote for the show was called “Willkommen.” They wrote 60 more songs. “Some of them were outrageous,” Kander says. “We wrote some antisemitic songs”—of which there were many in Weimar cabarets—“ ‘Good neighbor Cohen, loaned you a loan.’ We didn’t get very far with that one.”

They did write one song about antisemitism: “If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song),” in which the Emcee dances with his lover, a gorilla in a pink tutu. At the end of the number, he turns to the audience and whispers: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewishhh at all.” It was, they thought, the most powerful song in the score.

The working title of their musical was Welcome to Berlin. But then a woman who sold blocks of tickets to theater parties told Prince that her Jewish clients would not buy a show with “Berlin” in the title. Strolling along the beach one day, Joe Masteroff, who was writing the musical’s book, thought of two recent hits, Carnival and Camelot. Both started with a C and had three syllables. Why not call the show Cabaret?

To play the Emcee, Prince tapped his friend Joel Grey. A nightclub headliner, Grey could not break into Broadway. “The theater was very high-minded,” he once said. When Prince called him, he was playing a pirate in a third-rate musical in New York’s Jones Beach. “Hal knew I was dying,” Grey recounts over lunch in the West Village, where he lives. “I wanted to quit the business.”

At first, he struggled to create the Emcee, who did not interact with the other characters. He had numbers but “no words, no lines, no role,” Grey wrote in his memoir, Master of Ceremonies. A polished performer, he had no trouble with the songs, the dances, the antics. “But something was missing,” he says. Then he remembered a cheap comedian he’d once seen in St. Louis. The comic had told lecherous jokes, gay jokes, sexist jokes—anything to get a laugh. One day in rehearsal, Grey did everything the comedian had done “to get the audience crazy. I was all over the girls, squeezing their breasts, touching their bottoms. They were furious. I was horrible. When it was over I thought, This is the end of my career.” He disappeared backstage and cried. “And then from out of the darkness came Mr. Prince,” Grey says. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Joely, that’s it.’ ”

Cabaret played its first performance at the Shubert Theatre in Boston in the fall of 1966. Grey stopped the show with the opening number, “Willkommen.” “The audience wouldn’t stop applauding,” Grey recalls. “I turned to the stage manager and said, ‘Should I get changed for the next scene?’ ”

The musical ran long—it was in three acts—but it got a prolonged standing ovation. As the curtain came down, Richard Seff, an agent who represented Kander and Ebb, ran into Ebb in the aisle. “It’s wonderful,” Seff said. “You’ll fix the obvious flaws.” In the middle of the night, Seff’s phone rang. It was Ebb. “You hated it!” the songwriter screamed. “You are of no help at all!”

Ebb was reeling because he’d learned Prince was going to cut the show down to two acts. Ebb collapsed in his hotel bed, Kander holding one hand, Grey the other. “You’re not dying, Fred,” Kander told him. “Hal has not wrecked our show.”

Cabaret came roaring into New York, fueled by tremendous word of mouth. But there was a problem. Some Jewish groups were furious about “If You Could See Her.” How could you equate a gorilla with a Jew? they wanted to know, missing the point entirely. They threatened to boycott the show. Prince, his eye on ticket sales, told Ebb to change the line “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all” to something less offensive: “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” using the Yiddish word for a homely person.

It is difficult to imagine the impact Cabaret had on audiences in 1966. World War II had ended only 21 years before. Many New York theatergoers had fled Europe or fought the Nazis. There were Holocaust survivors in the audience; there were people whose relatives had died in the gas chambers. Grey knew the show’s power. Some nights, dancing with the gorilla, he’d whisper “Jewish” instead of “meeskite.” The audience gasped.

Cabaret won eight Tony Awards in 1967, catapulted Grey to Broadway stardom, and ran for three years. Seff sold the movie rights for $1.5 million, a record at the time. Prince, about to begin rehearsals for Stephen Sondheim’s Company, was unavailable to direct the movie, scheduled for a 1972 release. So the producers hired the director and choreographer Bob Fosse, who needed the job because his previous movie, Sweet Charity, had been a bust.

Fosse, who saw Prince as a rival, stamped out much of what Prince had done, including Joel Grey. He wanted Ruth Gordon to play the Emcee. But Grey was a sensation, and the studio wanted him. “It’s either me or Joel,” Fosse said. When the studio opted for Grey, Fosse backed down. But he resented Grey, and relations between them were icy.

A 26-year-old Liza Minnelli, on the way to stardom herself, was cast as Sally Bowles. The handsome Michael York would play the Cliff character, whose name in the movie was changed to Brian Roberts. And supermodel Marisa Berenson (who at the time seemed to be on the cover of Vogue every other month) got the role of a Jewish department store heiress, a character Fosse took from Isherwood’s short story “The Landauers.”

Cabaret was shot on location in Munich and Berlin. “The atmosphere was extremely heavy,” Berenson recalls. “There was the whole Nazi period, and I felt very much the Berlin Wall, that darkness, that fear, all that repression.” She adored Fosse, but he kept her off balance (she was playing a young woman traumatized by what was happening around her) by whispering “obscene things in my ear. He was shaking me up.”

Minnelli, costumed by Halston for the film, found Fosse “brilliant” and “incredibly intense,” she tells Vanity Fair in a rare interview. “He used every part of me, including my scoliosis. One of my great lessons in working with Fosse was never to think that whatever he was asking couldn’t be done. If he said do it, you had to figure out how to do it. You didn’t think about how much it hurt. You just made it happen.”

Back in New York, Fosse arranged a private screening of Cabaret for Kander and Ebb. When it was over, they said nothing. “We really hated it,” Kander admits. Then they went to the opening at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The audience loved it. “We realized it was a masterpiece,” Kander says, laughing. “It just wasn’t our show.”

“PAPA WAS EVEN MORE EXCITED ABOUT THE OSCAR THAN I WAS,” SAYS LIZA MINNELLI. “AND, BABY, I WAS—NO, I AM STILL—EXCITED.”

The success of the movie—with its eight Academy Awards—soon overshadowed the musical. When people thought of Cabaret, they thought of finger snaps and bowler hats. They thought of Fosse and, of course, Minnelli, who would adopt the lyric “Life is a cabaret” as her signature. Her best-actress Oscar became part of a dynasty: Her mother, Judy Garland, and father, director Vincente Minnelli, each had one of their own. “Papa was even more excited about the Oscar than I was,” she says. “And, baby, I was—no, I am still—excited.”

By 1987—in part to burnish Cabaret’s theatrical legacy—Prince decided to recreate his original production on Broadway, with Grey once again serving as the Emcee. But it had the odor of mothballs. The New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote that it was not, as Sally Bowles sings, “perfectly marvelous,” but “it does approach the perfectly mediocre.” Much of the show, he added, was “old-fashioned and plodding.”

In the early 1990s, Sam Mendes, then a young director running a pocket-size theater in London called the Donmar Warehouse, heard the novelist Martin Amis give a talk. Amis was writing Time’s Arrow, about a German doctor who works in a concentration camp. “I’ve already written about the Nazis and people say to me, ‘Why are you doing it again?’ ” Amis said. “And I say, what else is there?”

At the end of the day,” Mendes tells me, “the biggest question of the 20th century is, ‘How could this have happened?’ ” Mendes decided to stage Cabaret at the Donmar in 1993. Another horror was unfolding at the time: Serb paramilitaries were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims, “ethnic cleansing” on an unimaginable scale.

Mendes hit on a terrific concept for his production: He transformed his theater into a nightclub. The audience sat at little tables with red lamps. And the performers were truly seedy. He told the actors playing the Kit Kat Club girls not to shave their armpits or their legs. “Unshaved armpits—it sent shock waves around the theater,” he recalls. Since there was no room—or money—for an orchestra, the actors played the instruments. Some of them could hit the right notes.

To play the Emcee, Mendes cast Alan Cumming, a young Scottish actor whose comedy act Mendes had enjoyed. “Can you sing?” Mendes asked him. “Yeah,” Cumming said. Mendes threw ideas at him and “he was open to everything.” Just before the first preview, Mendes suggested he come out during the intermission and chat up the audience, maybe dance with a woman. Mendes, frantic before the preview, never got around to giving Cumming any more direction than that. No matter. Cumming sauntered onstage as people were settling back at their tables, picked a man out of the crowd, and started dancing with him. “Watch your hands,” he said. “I lead.”

Cumming’s Emcee was impish, fun, gleefully licentious. The audience loved him. “I have never had less to do with a great performance in one of my shows than I had to do with Alan,” Mendes says.

When Joe Masteroff came to see the show in London, Mendes was nervous. He’d taken plenty of liberties with the script. Cliff, the narrator, was now openly gay. (One night, when Cliff kissed a male lover, a man in the audience shouted, “Rubbish!”) And he made the Emcee a victim of the Nazis. In the final scene, Cumming, in a concentration camp uniform affixed with a yellow Star of David and a pink triangle, is jolted, as if he’s thrown himself onto the electrified fence at Birkenau.

“I should be really pissed with you,” Masteroff told Mendes after the show. “But it works.” Kander liked it too, though he was not happy that the actors didn’t play his score all that well. Ebb hated it. “He wanted more professionalism,” Mendes says. “And he was not wrong. There was a dangerous edge of amateurishness about it.”

The Roundabout Theatre Company brought Cabaret to New York in 1998. Rob Marshall, who would go on to direct the movie Chicago, helped Mendes give the show some Broadway gloss while retaining its grittiness. The two young directors were “challenging each other, pushing each other,” Marshall remembers, “to create something unique.”

Cumming reprised his role as the Emcee. He was on fire. Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, played Sally Bowles. She was not on fire. She’d never been in a musical before, and when she sang, “There was absolutely no sound coming out,” Kander says.

“She beat herself up about her singing all the time,” Mendes adds. “There was a deep, self-critical aspect of Tash that was instilled by her dad, a brilliant man but extremely cutting.” He once said to her out of nowhere: “We’re going to have to do something about your chin, dear.” As Mendes saw it, she always felt that she could never measure up to her parents.

Kander went to work with her, and slowly a voice emerged. It was not a “polished sound,” Marshall says, but it was haunting, vulnerable. Still, Cumming was walking away with the show. At the first preview, when he took his bow, the audience roared. When Richardson took hers, they were polite. Mendes remembers going backstage and finding her “in tears.” But she persevered and through sheer force of will created a Sally Bowles that “will break your heart,” Masteroff told me the day before I saw that production in the spring of 1998. She did indeed. (Eleven years later, while learning how to ski on a bunny hill on Mont Tremblant, she fell down. She died of a head injury two days later.)

The revival of Cabaret won four Tony Awards, including one for Richardson as best actress in a musical. It ran nearly 2,400 performances at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 and was revived again in 2014. And the money, money, money, as the song goes, poured in. Once Masteroff, having already filed his taxes at the end of a lucrative Cabaret year, went to the mailbox and opened a royalty check for $60,000. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he snapped.

Rebecca Frecknall grew up on Mendes’s Donmar Warehouse production of Cabaret. The BBC filmed it, and when it aired, her father videotaped it. She watched it “religiously.” But when she came to direct her production, she had to put Mendes’s version out of her mind.

Mendes turned his little theater into a nightclub. Frecknall, working with the brilliant set and costume designer Tom Scutt, has upped the game. They have transformed the entire theater into a Weimar cabaret. You stand in line at the stage door, waiting, you hope, to be let in. Once inside, you’re served drinks while the Kit Kat Club girls dance and flirt with you. The show’s logo is a geometric eye. Scutt sprinkles the motif throughout his sets and costumes. “It’s all part of the voyeurism,” Scutt explains. “The sense of always being watched, always watching—responsibility, culpability, implication, blame.”

REDMAYNE’S EMCEE IS STILL SEXY AND SEDUCTIVE, BUT AS THE SHOW GOES ON HE BECOMES A PUPPET MASTER MANIPULATING THE OTHER CHARACTERS, SOMETIMES TO THEIR DOOM.

Mendes’s Cabaret, like Fosse’s, had a black-and-white aesthetic—black fishnet stockings, black leather coats, a white face for the Emcee. Frecknall and Scutt begin their show with bright colors, which slowly fade to gray as the walls close in on the characters. “Color and individuality—to grayness and homogeneity,” Frecknall says.

As the first woman to direct a major production of Cabaret, Frecknall has focused attention on the Kit Kat Club girls—Rosie, Fritzie, Frenchie, Lulu, and Texas. “Often what I’ve seen in other productions is this homogenized group of pretty, white, skinny girls in their underwear,” she insists. Her Kit Kat Club girls are multiethnic. Some are transgender. Through performances and costumes, they are no longer appendages of the Emcee but vivid characters in their own right.

Her boldest stroke has been to reinvent the Emcee. She and Redmayne have turned him into a force of malevolence. He is still sexy and seductive, but as the show goes on, he becomes a skeletal puppet master manipulating the other characters to, in many cases, their doom. If Cumming’s Emcee was, in the end, a Holocaust victim, Redmayne’s is, in Frecknall’s words, “a perpetrator.”

Unwrapping a grilled cheese sandwich in his enormous Upper West Side townhouse, Kander says that his husband had recently asked him a pointed question: “Did it ever occur to you that all of you guys who created Cabaret were Jewish?”

“Not really,” Kander replied. “We were just trying to put on a show.” Or, as Masteroff once said: “It was a job.”

It’s a “job” that has endured. The producers of the Broadway revival certainly have faith in the show’s staying power. They’ve spent $25 million on the production, a big chunk of it going to reconfigure the August Wilson Theatre into the Kit Kat Club. Audience members will enter through an alleyway, be given a glass of schnapps, and can then enjoy a preshow drink at a variety of lounges designed by Scutt: The Pineapple Room, Red Bar, Green Bar, and Vault Bar. The show will be performed in the round, tables and chairs ringing the stage. And they’ll be able to enjoy a bottle (or two) of top-flight Champagne throughout the performance.

This revival is certainly the most lavish Cabaret in a long time. But there have been hundreds of other, less heralded productions over the years, with more on the way. A few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Cabaret was running in Moscow. Last December, Concord Theatricals, which licenses the show, authorized a production at the Molodyy Theatre in Kyiv. And a request is in for a production in Israel, the first since the show was produced in Tel Aviv in 2014.

“The interesting thing about the piece is that it seems to change with the times,” Kander says. “Nothing about it seems to be written in stone except its narrative and its implications.”

And whenever someone tells him the show is more relevant than ever, Kander shakes his head and says, “I know. And isn’t that awful?”′

You can also listen the entire article here !!

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/cabaret-revival

I know it's a very long article , but very interesting!!

#eddie redmayne #cabaret #cabaret story #theatre #vanity fair #liza minelli #alan cumming #rebecca frecknall #director #gayle rankin #sally bowles #the emcee #nyc #august wilson #broadway #tom scutt #costume designer #scenic theatre #emma stone

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blackcatrph · 1 year ago

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» ━━ BARBIE BIG CITY BIG DREAMS : LYRIC STARTERS.

lyrics taken from the barbie big city big dreams animation. please alter any pronouns when sending if needed.

“ i love the concrete jungle. ”

“ i’m a beach girl. ”

“ together we’re the best of both possible worlds. ”

“ our duo’s so dynamic. ”

“ like fire and rain, together we can set it off and make a big bang. ”

“ hey universe, look who’s coming at you. ”

“ for the first time i found my perfect match. ”

“ how did we ever survive before us ? ”

“ all i need now in my life is more us. ”

“ it’s like we’re meant to be, like destiny, so right. ”

“ i just go with the flow. ”

“ i plan out every day. ”

“ our master plan will lead us straight to broadway. ”

“ put respect on this groove. ”

“ through thick and thin. ”

“ we’ve got the brightest future. ”

“ where’ve you been? because i wish i’d met you sooner. ”

“ look and learn. ”

“ feel the burn. ”

“ just try harder. ”

“ this is tough. ”

“ tighten up. ”

“ my spirit is deflating. ”

“ my fear’s inflating. ”

“ this school is calling my bluff. ”

“ hope i have the right stuff. ”

“ remember how to be brave. ”

“ can i get out of my head ? ”

“ grind on my mind. ”

“ work it double time. ”

“ never fall a step behind. ”

“ this is what you wanted. ”

“ don’t be daunted. ”

“ just be patient and relax, cut yourself some slack. ”

“ why am i the only one who keeps scrambling and face planting ? ”

“ this is draining. ”

“ stop complaining. ”

“ i know it’s worth the trouble. ”

“ did everyone see ? ”

“ of course they saw. ”

“ pull yourself together. ”

“ practice until it’s perfect. ”

“ plant your feet. ”

“ use your core. ”

“ keep the beat. ”

“ get off the floor. ”

“ how can you even show your face ? ”

“ i’m losing my mind. ”

“ i flew in on cloud nine. ”

“ made a new best friend. ”

“ there wasn’t a question that everything would work out perfectly. ”

“ spoke too soon. ”

“ worst in the room, like a total crash landing. ”

“ i’m not going to let that keep me down. ”

“ it’s all about those good vibes. ”

“ take a look at me, so on pointe and savvy. ”

“ the whole world at my feet. ”

“ didn’t know what fear meant. ”

“ guess i’m not immune to the laws of gravity. ”

“ crutches won’t be keeping me earthbound. ”

“ is the glass half full or half empty ? ”

“ let the positivity take over. ”

“ como se dice ? let me put it this way. ”

“ chequen esto, chicas, mi visión loca. ”

“ my imagination soars. ”

“ got to spread my wings and get to higher ground. ”

“ back here again, losing a friend. ”

“ i thought i was strong, but i’m reeling. ”

“ this time felt different, our connection was instant. ”

“ that was pure magical thinking. ”

“ just move on from the pain. ”

“ soon it’ll fade like a memory. ”

“ you’ll start over again. ”

“ evolving from this fateful origin story. ”

“ a chariot streaks across the sky so majestically. ”

“ two girls on an odyssey in the city that never sleeps. ”

“ riding high on a merry go round of modern mythology. ”

“ discovered a new part of me in a fated friend. ”

“ i knew finding you would be an epic journey with no end. ”

“ you can’t see shooting stars in the city of marquee lights. ”

“ fate brough us together then tore us apart. ”

“ i wish i could go back and restart. ”

“ i’ll race across the sky to a work where dreams and friendships aren’t destined to collide. ”

“ stranded on this lonely island. ”

“ great beginnings don’t get happy endings. ”

“ glorious mythologies can slip out of your reach. ”

“ in reality, best friends leave. ”

“ you’re my fiercest competition. ”

“ we’re best friends, no contradiction. ”

“ never let jealousy get in our way. ”

“ help each other up. ”

“ you set the bar, i’ll raise it. ”

“ you won’t catch me holding back. ”

“ why should our drive divide us ? ”

“ let’s let our strength unite us. ”

“ i’ve still got your back. ”

“ see you at the finish line. ”

“ when you need the strength to clear it, i’m gonna be there cheering. ”

“ i’m never leaving you behind. ”

“ if you stumble, just keep your fight on. ”

“ follow my voice to my arms. ”

“ we’re going hard and we’re going together. ”

“ we know what we want. ”

“ we’re giving up never. ”

“ we were born to show the world just who the boss is. ”

“ stopping more traffic than midtown rush hour. ”

“ you know we’re doing it right. ”

“ lean on my shoulder. ”

“ we’ve got each other, that’s the way it’ll always be. ”

“ bank on our future, it’s gold. ”

“ we’ll wake up with our names in lights. ”

#ask meme #rp ask prompts #rp meme #rp prompt #rp memes #rp ask memes #rp starter meme #starter meme #rp meme starter #rp sentence starters #barbie rp meme #rp lyric meme #lyric rp meme #lyrical meme #help this is so fruity

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d-criss-news · 1 month ago

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Darren Criss embraces technology and his mixed heritage in his Broadway premiere

Late last month, I spoke with Darren Criss for his upcoming Broadway premiere, Maybe Happy Ending, in which he plays a robot (a Helperbot to be specific) named Oliver who’s been deemed obsolete by technological standards. Another Helperbot, Claire, asks to borrow his charger, and thus begins a unique friendship between the two.

Maybe Happy Ending was written and produced in both Korean and English and has had performances all over the world. This production features Asian American creatives both on stage and behind the scenes. Criss himself identifies as half-Filipino on his mother’s side, and has said his feelings on his identity have evolved over the years. In 2018, he was quoted in Vulture saying that he did not identify as Asian American. In 2020, he would later shift his perspective after playing a half-Filipino character in Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, telling People:

“It’s a tricky cocktail in America ... Anyone who is biracial can attest to this: No matter how much or how little they look like their respective mix, it’s a constant work in progress … I’ve always been proud of my heritage, of being Filipino. Just because people don’t see it, doesn’t make it any less real to me.”

I got the chance to speak with Criss not just about identity, but about his career at large, how he relates to the character of Oliver, and what audiences will take from Maybe Happy Ending.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bri Ng Schwartz: As a biracial person with Asian identity, how does it feel to be working on a show that’s been produced and written in both Korean and American? Darren Criss: This show isn’t categorically an Asian show. It is very much a universal human’s show, but it happens to celebrate and represent a large degree of Asian-ness. Anytime you can show up for your cultural identity, that’s always a very exciting thing. It’s very exciting that the vast majority of people working on the show, on stage and off, are of Asian American mix and descent. The Asian experience is not a singular experience. It’s a very large breadth of backgrounds, so it’s been fun for all of us to bring our own experiences and stories to the table.

BNS: I saw you about 10 years ago at the Belasco when you were starring as Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. DC: Oh boy. This will be a little different.

BNS: Yeah, definitely different. As you return to the Belasco for Maybe Happy Ending, how do you think you’ve evolved as a performer in the last 10 years? DC: I hopefully have evolved as a person. If I’m the same person that was 10 years ago, then we have a serious problem. I’m just still trying to learn, still trying to connect as many dots as I can. Hopefully I never know the answer to that.

BNS: We are forever learning as humans. DC: Exactly.

BNS: I spoke to your former on-screen father, Jon Jon Briones, a couple of months ago. DC: He’s the best, and he was part of this production! This show has been around in many iterations for a long time, and he actually was part of a reading several years ago. We find ourselves connected yet again, me and Jon Jon. He’s awesome. He’s the best.

BNS: Do you take any advice or inspiration from people like Jon Jon or other seasoned Broadway vets in your work? DC: There are these goalposts that artists may think are the be-all and end-all of what makes a successful career. Jon Jon’s consistency and longevity are the goalposts. He’s one of these guys, if I mention his name, half of the room knows him or has worked with him. There are a lot of guys like Jon Jon who just are constantly a part of things. And that’s the goal. Success in devoting yourself long form to the craft, which he has done in spades.

BNS: In Maybe Happy Ending you play Oliver, a Helperbot 3. Do you think there are any parallels between you and how Oliver perceives the world? DC: I am endlessly curious and endlessly trying to download and learn as much as I can from the world around me, whether consciously or unconsciously. I happen to be a human being, and Oliver is not.

I’m still getting under the skin of this guy, of this robot. I’m finding a lot of parallels as far as the desire to please. I always say I’m in the service industry. I service ideas and emotions and people. That is my vocation. My programming.

BNS: Do you think that audiences are going to walk away from this show feeling differently about their technology? DC: Technology becomes more human in the way we treat it. When people put away their phones, they get sad. They’re like an appendage. We’ve already started to ascribe emotional connectivity to our non-human components. People will walk away with perhaps a more emotional experience with the human components they have in their life.

The battery life that our devices have are a microcosm metaphor for our own battery life, our own shelf life, and our own energy. The finite amount of time that we have, and really coming to peace with the idea that we are a transient technology ourselves, considering that, and hopefully, making sure that your battery life is spent on the right things, I think is the thing I hope people walk away with this show.

On top of hopefully singing the songs, because they’re beautiful.

BNS: They really are. Thank you so much for taking the time today. On behalf of mixed theater kids everywhere, thank you. I don’t think I would be who I am without having you to look up to. DC: Thank you for letting me be a part of it.

#darren criss #joy sauce #maybe happy ending #maybe happy ending bway #press #oct 2024

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mrs-stans · 2 months ago

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Sebastian Stan’s Crash Course in Becoming Trump

After a long tour of duty in the Marvel universe, the Romanian-born actor is conquering the festival circuit, with starring roles in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man.”

Illustration by João Fazenda

By Alex Barasch

The actor Sebastian Stan glanced approvingly at the neon signage and old-school menus at the Pearl Diner, in the financial district, the other day. He’s lived in and near New York since he was twelve—around the time Donald Trump swapped his first wife, Ivana, for Marla Maples—and has watched the city evolve. “It’s funny. It’s changed, but it’s also the same buildings,” he said. “And then you’re, like, ‘The buildings are there, but you are not the same.’ ”

Stan took off a white ball cap and ordered coffee with cream; he was jet-lagged, fresh from the Deauville American Film Festival, where he’d received the Hollywood Rising-Star Award. “Rising” is a stretch for the forty-two-year-old, who’s appeared in a dozen Marvel projects, but Stan has lately reached a different echelon. In May, he went to Cannes for “The Apprentice,” in which he plays seventies-era Trump. In Berlin, he’d won the Silver Bear, an award whose previous recipients include Denzel Washington and Paul Newman. “Everyone was, like, ‘Oh, the Silver Bear!’ ” Stan said. “Then you go back and you’re, like, ‘Do we know what the Silver Bear is in America?’ ”

The prize was for his role in “A Different Man,” Aaron Schimberg’s surreal black comedy, which nods to “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Stan stars as a man whose lifelong disfigurement is miraculously reversed; the shoot included a grisly three-and-a-half-hour session spent peeling off chunks of his face.

“The Apprentice” demanded a transformation of a different sort. At the diner, Stan pulled out his phone and swiped through an album labelled “DT physicality”—a hundred and thirty videos of Trump, which capture his tiniest gestures and his over-all mien. Marinating in Trump content was, Stan said cheerfully, “a psychotic experience.” He watched the clips so many times that when the director, Ali Abbasi, asked him to improvise in a scene about marketing Trump Tower, he could rattle off the stats: sixty-eight stories of marble in a peachy hue chosen by Ivana, because, as the real Trump put it in a promo, “people feel they look better in the pink.” (It turned out that he’d also memorized Trump’s lie: the tower is actually fifty-eight floors.)

Growing up in Communist Romania, Stan had just an hour of TV news each night; New Year’s Eve was an event because it meant twelve hours of programming. His instinct for mimicry—he had a habit of imitating family members and neighbors—was the earliest tell that he might be an actor. After he and his mother fled to Vienna, in 1989, Stan got his first credit, in a Michael Haneke film—an experience that nearly put him off show business. “I stood in line with, like, a thousand kids, for I don’t know how many hours—which I hated,” he said. “If I could fucking meet Haneke now, it would be amazing!”

When the family moved again, to America, he experienced pop-culture shock. He binged every movie he’d missed—from “Back to the Future” to “Ace Ventura”—in a pal’s basement. Another friend roped him into the school play. “My high school was really, really small, so I didn’t have a lot of competition,” Stan said. “They were, like, ‘Please be in the play!’ ” Soon he was playing Cyrano himself.

After stints on Broadway, and on “Gossip Girl,” Stan was scooped up by Marvel. “I’ve been lucky to play a character for fifteen years,” he said. The blockbuster paychecks freed him up to explore edgier material. “I, Tonya,” in which he played the ice-skater Tonya Harding’s dirtbag husband, was a turning point. “It allowed me to see that a good director will bring out more in you than you can,” Stan said. It was also his first time portraying a real person—a feat that he repeated in “Pam & Tommy,” as the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and now in “The Apprentice.”

“It’s like learning a piece of music,” Stan said, of nailing an impression. “You’ve got to start out slow—it requires practice. Suddenly, you’re getting it more. You’re still making mistakes—but you’re playing the music. You’re playing the music every day until you can do it in your sleep. That’s when the fun starts.” He sliced the air for emphasis, then caught himself and grinned. “And sometimes it’s months later at a diner, and you’re, like, ‘Why am I doing that with my hands?’ ”

#Sebastian Stan #The New Yorker #Interview #The Apprentice #Ali Abbasi #A Different Man #Aaron Schimberg #mrs-stans

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