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Monday, June 30, 2008
‘High School Musical’ won’t play Fox this summer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta’s Theater of the Stars is about to have some disappointed tweens on its hands.
The local Broadway producer has pulled the plug on the August engagement of the wildy popular stage version of “High School Musical.” However, the theater says it will stage a new production of the hit at the Fox Theatre next summer, then send it out on tour.
Disney Theatrical Productions’ first national tour of “High School Musical” was supposed to conclude Aug. 15-24 at the Fox, where Theater of the Stars premiered the show in January 2007. On Monday, Theater of the Stars and Disney said the engagement was being scrubbed “due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts.” The tour will now close in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Aug. 3.
Theater of the Stars President Nick Manos said he recently pitched the idea of producing a second national tour to Disney Theatricals, and once that plan was approved, “it made more sense for us to do it next summer than be the final stop of the tour.”
Details and dates of the second tour are still in the works. “It will probably be a largely new cast,” Manos said.
Meanwhile, patrons with “High School Musical” tickets have three options. Exchange them for seats to Theater of the Stars’ world premiere of “High School Musical 2” (Nov. 7-16 at the Fox); exchange them for seats to next summer’s engagement of “High School Musical,” or get a full refund at the point of purchase.
Exchanges can be made beginning July 8.
For more information: www.theaterofthestars.com.
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Beethoven, the ASO and Drought at Encore Park
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Saturday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park. www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The water drought, terrible for Georgia, might be a business asset for Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park, the new summertime home of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, facing its own sort of classical-music drought in recent years.
The ASO built and operates the venue and played Encore Park’s over-the-top inaugural gala (marching bands, fireworks) in May.
Since then, the 12,000-seat Alpharetta pavilion has hosted mega-rock shows and received heaps of audience praise (a nice vibe; convenient for folks in the northern suburbs) and scorn (frequent ticket snafus; no public transportation; distant parking lots for sold-out events and long waits for the shuttle buses; mixed quality of food and beverage services).
Saturday, for the ASO’s first “normal” show — a stock program of muscular Beethoven — I had bought the cheapest ticket off the ASO’s Web site, $30.50, and found a nice spot on the general admission lawn.
It’s my new seat of preference. Hot, rainless summers, with a light breeze, will play nicely out here.
Though the boomy amplification is designed more for the black-and-whiteness of the rock ’n’ roll sound than for classical’s sonic palette of color, at least you can hear equally well everywhere. Paradoxically, the musicians always appear distant, even from near the stage.
Jumbo video screens telescope that gap. The ASO has taken lessons from the Metropolitan Opera’s hugely popular movie theater broadcasts. Here the pre-show and intermission diversions include backstage interviews and audience-participation activities, like texting questions for conductor Robert Spano to answer.
And Encore Park might come to the rescue for the ASO’s attendance drought for ticket sales in Midtown’s Symphony Hall.
It used to be tough to lure 1,000 folks to Symphony Hall summer classics, according to ASO marketing chief Charlie Wade. Saturday’s Encore Park concert, without much effort, drew 3,100.
And the ASO is attracting new fans at its new space. The proof? After each movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto (with pianist Dejan Lazic) and Fifth Symphony, the audience applauded with vigor — a sincere appreciation for the focused and virtuosic performance, and an unmistakable indicator of newness to etiquette-choked classical culture. You could almost smell the rain a-comin’. Will it be enough to end the drought?
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Exquisite ‘Merchant’ @ Georgia Shakes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The collateral that Shylock demands from the Merchant of Venice is enough to make you squirm.
If the merchant Antonio can’t repay his loan in time, Shylock reserves the right to cut a pound of flesh from the debtor’s body. And in the suspenseful courtroom scene of the problematic play, the Jewish money-lender comes within a hair’s breadth of carving a chunk out of his enemy’s bosom.
“The Merchant of Venice” — which traffics in brutal anti-Semitic language, Jewish stereotypes and what modern audiences would label as hate crimes— can make for uneasy and troubling theater-going. Fortunately, director Sabin Epstein’s new Georgia Shakespeare production chooses to emphasize the frothy romantic comedy swirling around the nasty business.
This “Merchant of Venice” is a ravishingly appointed, cleverly conceived affair that strikes just the right tone — luxuriating in the Bard’s sparkling wit and evincing superb performances from the ensemble.
Epstein’s top-notch design team puts all the action of Venice and Belmont in a marvelously scaled 19th-century drawing room, where the ladies flutter about in drop-dead gorgeous gowns and elegantly suited men sip brandy and espresso from delicate porcelain cups.
Leslie Taylor envisions an opulent, black-walled interior stencilled all over with an essential bit of text. Mike Post lights the stage with a painterly eye. And Christine Turbitt outfits the company in truly breath-taking costumes.
Portia, a wealthy heiress with a steady procession of suitors, makes quite an entrance, hurling a bouquet of long-stemmed roses to the floor. Portia is one of Shakespeare’s smartest female characters, and Park Krausen imbues her with whip-smart authority and delicious comedic flair. (Notice the way Portia glibly mocks the accents of her German and English callers.)
In the much smaller part of Portia’s “waiting gentlewoman,” Tess Malis Kincaid also cuts an elegant figure — and she even gets to sing.
Allen O’Reilly’s Antonio (the merchant) is by turns monstrous and sympathetic. Antonio’s friends — Daniel Thomas May as Solanio, Brad Sherrill as Salerio and Chris Ensweiler as the foolish Gratiano — are spot-on in their characterizations, and a seriously handsome bunch to boot. Enoch King, as Shylock’s clown Launcelot, is delightful, and Hudson Adams is rich and ribald in a variety of roles. (Adams’ decrepit, asthmatic-sounding Prince of Aragon is particularly funny.) As Bassanio, the man who finally conquers Portia, Joe Knezevich gives a delicately nuanced and highly sensitive reading of a man in love. Perfect.
Finally, Chris Kayser, one of the busiest actors in town, wholly reinvents himself as Shylock. With his ethnic accent and swarthy countenance, his Shylock is the ultimate outsider but never a caricature.
By decree of her father’s will, Portia’s suitors determine their fate by choosing blindly from a trio of boxes: one gold, one silver and one lead. As the tale attests, everything that glitters is not gold. But in the world of this complicated and controversial story of money and love, it doesn’t hurt that the material trappings are so nice to look at.
THE 411: Through Aug. 2. In rotating repertory with “As You Like It” and “All’s Well That Ends Well,” opening July 11. $15-$40. Georgia Shakespeare, Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road, Atlanta. 404-264-0020, gashakespeare.org.
BOTTOM LINE: Exquisite in every detail.
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Ooh, another list! EW’s Top 100 books of the last 25 years
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Everyone loves lists prepared by magazine editors or bloggers or the like. Not the actual lists, but the act of reading them and reacting to them.
Are you kiddin’ me? They ranked THAT over THAT? You get a little surge of adrenaline and sometimes of superiority, and then move on. Lists don’t require a lot of commitment.
Which brings us to the latest book list, Entertainment Weekly’s Top 100 books of the past 25 years, part of an issue that did the same thing to movies, TV, music, etc.
Of course the result is preposterous. A Harry Potter novel at No. 2, ahead of all the literature written in the last 25 years, will start that little vein throbbing in your temple. Then you work your way down the the bottom, and see “The Da Vinci Code” ranked, without even a mention of “In the Beauty of the Lilies” by John Updike or ‘Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin, to name but a couple of works of art that come to mind that are not on the list at all. It’s anuerysm time, baby!
On the positive side, I was delighted to see such “The Things They Carried” (31), “Parting the Waters” (32) and “Praying for Sheetrock (44), outstanding books but not the ones you expect to see on lists like this.
So here is the whole list, below, presented like a pinata. Reader, here are your sticks. Start bashing away!
The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)
Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (1990)
Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
Money, Martin Amis (1985)
Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
The Predators’ Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)
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