If there are a million Reeve Carney as Orpheus fans in the world, I am one of them. If there are only two Reeve Carney as Orpheus fans in the world, I am one of them (Eva Noblezada is the other). If there are no Reeve Carney as Orpheus fans in the world, Eva Noblezada and I are dead 😔
"I am all in a bother and miserable without you here. Have I told you this? I must have. Do you think you might come down this week? There is sure to be enough time. Just bring all your work. Of course, you may spend all your time in your study here if you wish it! I shall simply sit there in the corner, by the Kentia between the back wall and the large bookcase, and watch you at work ..."
A little while ago I wrote a short fiction set in a late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century AU, called Shadow Theatre. Basically Seiji and Nicholas are rival scholars in occult studies. Shadow Theatre tells their story.
The wonderful @johannathemad has produced this amazing image of the two in Nicholas's study at Fairhaven House. Mind-blowing. Thank you so much Jo for working with all my wild ideas x 💝💪 So fortunate to have had the chance to commission you!
I think if every Charlie fan saw him deliver the monologue at the end of this specific scene in such a raw, poignant way they would've bawled over. A gorgeous scene fantastically delivered by Charlie. Still living in my mind rent-free after almost 4 years:
For More That Twenty Years, Billy Guthrie Fought The Law, But The Law Won
Billy Guthrie built a career flouting the legal authorities. He spent almost as much time in Cincinnati’s courtrooms as he did in his notorious saloons. He died, apparently unrepentant, having created a Cincinnati legend that stretched from the Gay Nineties into Prohibition.
If you had asked William W. Guthrie, he would have claimed to be a put-upon proprietor of some humble cultural establishments. If you asked Cincinnati’s progressive reformers, Guthrie was the devil incarnate, spewing vice and degradation from the noxious hellholes he referred to as “concert halls.”
For the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Guthrie operated a disreputable resort named The Fashion on Opera Place, just off Vine Street below Sixth Street. Allegedly, the building had once housed a synagogue. The Cincinnati Post [16 March 1910] captured the atmosphere and allure of The Fashion:
“The patrons of The Fashion are neither lovers of good music nor dancing, and they do not go there for either. Between the acts at The Fashion the women performers can be found drinking with the men at the tables in the loges. Their value to the house is purely in the drinks that men buy for them. They prefer bottle beer and mixed drinks. They sit at the tables in their short stage skirts and can be seen from the outside.”
While the crusading Cincinnati Post sputtered in indignation, Guthrie operated without any interference from the authorities so long as the city was controlled by George “Boss” Cox and his minions. Guthrie owned a city “concert hall” license and waved it in the face of anyone who suggested that his dive was anything but that.
In 1910, a reform-minded Republican, Henry Hunt, was elected county prosecutor despite Boss Cox’s obstruction. He launched a campaign against gambling and vice and was so successful that he was later elected mayor and even prompted Boss Cox to issue a public statement that he was retiring from politics.
While Hunt may have rattled The Boss, Billy Guthrie shrugged off Hunt’s efforts to shutter The Fashion. Hunt saw to it that Guthrie’s concert hall license was not renewed, but the saloonist quickly adapted. According to the Cincinnati Post [14 August 1911]:
“Guthrie’s place was formerly licensed as a concert hall. The license was taken away from him and now he is running the same kind of hall without a license. Formerly, Guthrie employed singers, who, when they did not sing, ‘sat in’ and promoted the sale of drinks. When his license was revoked Guthrie abolished the singers and installed an orchestra. Presto! It ceased to be a concert hall, but became merely a saloon with a music box.”
This “saloon with a music box” continued to employ women of negotiable affection who greeted their admirers and encouraged them to buy abundant drinks. While they no longer sang on The Fashion’s stage, it was reported that they hummed along with the popular tunes performed by the “orchestra,” which was usually a piano accompanying a violin.
While Guthrie jousted with the Cincinnati reformers, he took out a sort of insurance policy by opening another saloon outside the city limits, almost directly across from the entrance to Chester Park. Chester Park itself usually attracted a mainstream clientele with a variety of rides, a huge lake for swimming and boating and theaters staging opera and musical comedy. On occasion, Chester Park brought in a very different sort of customer when it hosted prize fights that were illegal in Cincinnati. The whole area around Winton Road and Spring Grove Avenue had not yet been annexed to the city and was colonized by saloons eager to escape Cincinnati’s more restrictive regulations. The Post christened that neighborhood “The Wicked Strip” and Billy Guthrie fit right in.
In 1910, motion pictures were still a very new medium, inspiring some legislative reactions we find amusing today. For example, as noted, prize fighting was prohibited within the Cincinnati city limits. Apparently, the city administration saw no difference between real pugilists pounding each other in the ring and cinematic boxers pounding each other on the silver screen. So, indeed, Cincinnati prohibited motion pictures showing prize fights.
Billy Guthrie was happy to provide a venue for a film capturing the highlights of what was then billed as “The Fight of the Century” between the first African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and the former heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries. The Post [26 August 1910] went apoplectic:
“The whole country rose in opposition to the Jeffries-Johnson fight pictures. Mayor Schwab prohibited them. The pictures were driven out of Covington. Banished everywhere in the neighborhood, they found a wide-armed welcome in the Wicked Strip that knows no law and doesn’t care. The pictures were placed on exhibition in Guthrie’s Avenue Theater – Guthrie being the man whose disreputable Fashion Concert Hall on Opera-pl. has been driven off the street by the force of public sentiment.”
Billy Guthrie found that the wages of sin provided quite a comfortable income. It’s a toss-up whether his name appears more often in the criminal court logs or the real estate columns of the newspapers. Back then, with banks regularly going insolvent with no deposit insurance, land was where people parked their cash. Guthrie bought or sold a parcel or two almost every week.
Curiously, it seems that Guthrie, an otherwise savvy businessman, was a poor judge of character. On at least two occasions, it was reported that he posted bail for a defendant (presumably one of his customers) who stiffed him by failing to appear in court. In each case, Guthrie forfeited more than a thousand dollars.
What the local constabulary could not do, national legislation achieved. The dawn of Prohibition marked the end of Billy Guthrie’s lucrative saloons. He made a half-hearted attempt to keep a dive bar going in the West End but was busted by federal agents and settled into retirement. Guthrie turned the Avenue Theater over to his son, who operated it as a more-or-less law-abiding café. The location, at the corner of Mitchell and Spring Grove, is now occupied by a car wash.
Billie Guthrie died, aged 66, in 1929 from a heart condition and is buried just down the road from the “Wicked Strip” in Spring Grove Cemetery.
Eight shows a week in 1995, Veanne Cox (1963) sang "Getting Married Today" in the oft-overlooked revival of Company, earning a Tony nomination for her harrowing effort. While I know and love her as Calliope in the best Cinderella (1997) screen adaptation, her stage credits include The Dinner Party (2000) (alongside Diva Jan Maxwell), Caroline, or Change (2002) (alongside Divas Tonya Pinkins and Anika Noni Rose), and recently an off-Broadway production of Wedding Band (2022) where her character was astoundingly racist. She's a delightfully unhinged personality with an open-door policy on her NYC apartment for any fellow actor needing to crash for a night.
Two-time Tony nominee Charlotte d'Amboise (1964) is a hell of a dancer who has been flitting in and out of Chicago for the last twenty-five years. She has also starred in Company (1995), Contact (2001), Carrie (1988), and A Chorus Line (2006). She's also done Pippin (2013), but I had a C-theme going on so... Dance runs in the family. Both of her parents were accomplished professional dancers, as are her siblings. She is the Roxie, even on the cusp of sixty. It really adds layers to the whole fake-pregnancy storyline.
PROPAGANDA AND MEDIA UNDER CUT: ALL POLLS HERE
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"Veanne Cox is one of the funniest, most unhinged character actresses you'll ever meet. Just watch the clip above. I cried laughing. Love a woman who has something obviously deeply wrong with her. In her own words, she's a lot better than she used to be. She likes to tell a great story where she was being neurotic and insufferable in a dressing room somewhere and Betty Buckley came along, sat on her, and said "stop it. Just stop it." And she did. And now they're best friends, and Veanne got help. Also, she was 35 when she was in Cinderella, and Bernadette Peters was her mother at 50. Very funny to me. "
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"Yeah, I think that about sums it up. If you've seen Chicago at some point, statistically you're more likely to have seen Charlotte than any other Roxie."
Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. Aging, selfishness, sacrifice, love, loyalty, grief—the play’s wisdom aches across the centuries.
But Lear’s psychological insights are not, I think, what account for its new currency. Its political insights are. Shakespeare’s tragedy is a study of monarchy in crisis—of all that goes wrong when a leader’s problems become everyone else’s emergency. With every new staging, conditions that Americans prefer to think of as relics of an older, sadder time—inherited rule, incompetent despotism, coups—reveal their abiding impact. Lear’s ubiquity, in that sense, is understandable. It is also deeply embarrassing. The play should not translate so well. But here it is, all the same, ancient and acutely familiar. “Was he, maybe … losing it, a little?” Roman Roy asks himself, preparing the eulogy he will not deliver. He is talking about his father but also speaking to us, the audience. We might wonder the same. We, too, are the heirs of kings in decline.