Alison found this online. Now this is theatre!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
All You Have to Do
We moved into the theatre yesterday and it was a relatively painless load-in (other than the fact that the previous show left a gigantic mess for us, thanks guys!). About half the cast showed up to help, and our set guys David and Jeff seem to have everything under control. They both seem to be very easy-going, Zen-like dudes... as is Steve our lighting designer. Thank God. That always helps.
Now is one of two times during the process when I have a ton to do and it feels very overwhelming. Today, I need to mail the band parts and the recording off to the musicians (I should've already done this, but last week was crazy busy). That not may not seem like a big deal, but after I prepare the packages, I have to actually drive to the Post Office and wait behind a bunch of knuckle-draggers because of the post-9/11 rules that you can't mail a package over one pound without taking it to a Post Office. There's your government at work!
I have to deliver our postcards to the mailing house (Mailworks out in Westport), so they can go out late this week or early next week.
I have to finish work on the program, so I can take it to the printer next week.
I have to gather info for the High Fidelity posters and postcards to give to our graphic artist, so we can have postcards in the lobby during Assassins.
Today, I also have to pick up a bucket of KFC to use in our PR pics, which we're taking tonight before rehearsal. Cindy's getting her own Tab.
Tonight, we finally start running the whole show. We've run the two halves of it, but not the whole thing together yet.
We've received the guns we rented for the show, from a company called Weapons of Choice that rents to film and theatre productions. We'll start using the guns in the show tonight, but we probably won't start firing them till next week. We were planning to shoot directly at the audience in the show, but some of these guns are real guns with blank shells, so I've made an executive decision that we will not fire at the audience -- it just seems needlessly dangerous to me. (Can you tell I'm not a gun person?)
I finally got the prop list to Vicki, so she can get to work. It's not a super long list, but it's got some weird stuff on it this time... You'd think Assassins is this very minimalist show, but it requires a bunch of furniture (park bench, couch, car seat, electric chair, bar, etc.), a bunch of props (from a whole bunch of different periods and including guns and food, which sucks!), and costumes from many periods. Not so minimal. And really, folks, there's nothing more of a pain in the ass than using food in a show, just ask Vicki if you doubt me. For the record, can I just say that I Hate Sets and I Hate Props. I always try to minimize both with every show I do, but sometimes, you can only minimize so much... You gotta tell the story, after all...
In a few days, the immediate stress will subside for the moment, and then it will return on March 1 (when we do the lighting cue-to-cue rehearsal), March 2 (the first time the band plays with us), and then what we lovingly call Hell Week. For a few days early in the week we open, I'll be all stressed out again as I pull all the last minue details together and stomp out the various last minute fires. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Then we open March 6 and (I hope) I get to just have fun for four weeks of the run. Without the Archdiocese this time, knock on wood...!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Now is one of two times during the process when I have a ton to do and it feels very overwhelming. Today, I need to mail the band parts and the recording off to the musicians (I should've already done this, but last week was crazy busy). That not may not seem like a big deal, but after I prepare the packages, I have to actually drive to the Post Office and wait behind a bunch of knuckle-draggers because of the post-9/11 rules that you can't mail a package over one pound without taking it to a Post Office. There's your government at work!
I have to deliver our postcards to the mailing house (Mailworks out in Westport), so they can go out late this week or early next week.
I have to finish work on the program, so I can take it to the printer next week.
I have to gather info for the High Fidelity posters and postcards to give to our graphic artist, so we can have postcards in the lobby during Assassins.
Today, I also have to pick up a bucket of KFC to use in our PR pics, which we're taking tonight before rehearsal. Cindy's getting her own Tab.
Tonight, we finally start running the whole show. We've run the two halves of it, but not the whole thing together yet.
We've received the guns we rented for the show, from a company called Weapons of Choice that rents to film and theatre productions. We'll start using the guns in the show tonight, but we probably won't start firing them till next week. We were planning to shoot directly at the audience in the show, but some of these guns are real guns with blank shells, so I've made an executive decision that we will not fire at the audience -- it just seems needlessly dangerous to me. (Can you tell I'm not a gun person?)
I finally got the prop list to Vicki, so she can get to work. It's not a super long list, but it's got some weird stuff on it this time... You'd think Assassins is this very minimalist show, but it requires a bunch of furniture (park bench, couch, car seat, electric chair, bar, etc.), a bunch of props (from a whole bunch of different periods and including guns and food, which sucks!), and costumes from many periods. Not so minimal. And really, folks, there's nothing more of a pain in the ass than using food in a show, just ask Vicki if you doubt me. For the record, can I just say that I Hate Sets and I Hate Props. I always try to minimize both with every show I do, but sometimes, you can only minimize so much... You gotta tell the story, after all...
In a few days, the immediate stress will subside for the moment, and then it will return on March 1 (when we do the lighting cue-to-cue rehearsal), March 2 (the first time the band plays with us), and then what we lovingly call Hell Week. For a few days early in the week we open, I'll be all stressed out again as I pull all the last minue details together and stomp out the various last minute fires. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Then we open March 6 and (I hope) I get to just have fun for four weeks of the run. Without the Archdiocese this time, knock on wood...!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
And a lot of people shed a lot of tears...
Why are we doing Assassins?
Three dead in Louisiana
campus shooting
By Ruth Laney / Reuters
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana
A nursing student shot two women to death and killed herself in front of horrified classmates at a college in the southern U.S. state of Louisiana on Friday, Feb. 8, 2008, police said. Investigators still did not have a motive for the early morning killings at the Louisiana Technical College in the state capital, Baton Rouge, police spokesman L'Jean McKneely told Reuters.Details such as the names of the victims and the type of weapon used have not yet been released.
Blake Thibodeaux, 20, a drafting student at the college who was in a nearby classroom, said he heard what he initially thought was a door slamming and asked his teacher if he could investigate."I ran towards it and was at the door of the classroom when she shot off the last few rounds," he said, adding that the other students streamed in terror out of the room, many crying.
Police spent hours at the school gathering witness testimony and in the early afternoon were still not allowing people to enter the campus. Crowds of bystanders quietly milled around across the street.The shootings came just hours after a gunman killed two police officers and three city officials on Thursday night when he stormed into a city council meeting in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He was later shot dead by police.Mass shootings are not particularly rare in the United States, where the gun-ownership lobby is politically influential and gun control is far less strict than in many countries.
In the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, a student with a history of mental illness killed 32 people at Virginia Tech university in April 2007 before turning one of his guns on himself.In December, a 19-year-old gunman in Omaha, Nebraska, killed eight people and then himself at a shopping mall. On Saturday, a man robbing a clothing store outside Chicago shot five women to death.
Gunman Planned Campus Shooting
for at Least Six Days
'Rapid-Fire Assault' in Lecture Hall Killed 5,
Wounded 16 Other Students
Feb. 15, 2008 — The gunman who fatally shot five students before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall likely planned his murder spree at least a week in advance, investigators said today.
The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday -- indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.
The gunman, Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a one-time undergraduate and award-winning sociology graduate student at NIU, was "revered by faculty and staff" and gave "no indication that this was the type of person who would engage in this activity," said campus Police Chief Donald Grady.
Kazmierczak had recently stopped taking his medication and "had become somewhat erratic," Grady told reporters.
The fifth student died this morning from gunshot wounds suffered when Kazmierczak opened fire Thursday afternoon at NIU in DeKalb, Ill.
The shooter fired 54 rounds from the weapons, killing six, including himself, and wounding 16. Kazmierczak, dressed in black, was armed with three handguns and a shotgun as students took cover beneath desks and ran out of the lecture hall. He was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. He carried the shotgun concealed in a guitar case and the handguns under his coat. He entered the hall through a door near the front of the room's stage. No note has been found and no motive is yet known, Grady said.
"We have no motive and I have no way of knowing what the motive was," he said. In all, there were 23 casualties in the shooting, including the gunman. Several of the victims were taken to hospitals, where three later died. The others, including the shooter, died at the scene of the gunfire. Police said he reloaded the shotgun in a shooting that lasted less than five minutes, before he took his own life. Police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the first reports, but it was too late to stop the gunman.
"There is no note or threat that I know of," NIU president John Peters told ABC News. "By all accounts that we can tell right now [he] was a very good student that the professors thought well of."
Law enforcement authorities told ABC News' Jack Date that Kazmierczak bought two weapons Saturday at a gun store in Champaign, Ill., a Remington 12-gauge shotgun and 9 mm Glock pistol. From the same firearms dealer, he obtained a Hi Point 380 pistol Dec. 30, 2007 and SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol Aug. 6, 2007. Kazmierczak had no police record, allowing him to qualify to buy the guns under the state's gun laws, sources said.
An Internet gun dealer based in Green Bay, Wis. who sold a weapon to Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho last year sold two empty 9 mm Glock magazines and a Glock holster to Kazmierczak, the company said in a statement. Kazmierczak received the accessories from topglock.com, owned by TGSCOM Inc., on Tuesday, two days before the shooting. It remains unknown if the accessories were used in the shooting.
Good StudentBy all accounts Kazmierczak was a good student. Serving as a member of the NIU Academic Criminal Justice Association and a teaching aid as an undergraduate. In 2006 he received a Dean's Award from the sociology department. Kazmierczak's father, Robert, lives in Lakeland, Fla., and his mother died in September 2006. The shooting occurred during an introductory geology class at the university's Cole Hall in the campus center around 3:15 p.m. About 163 students were registered for the class.
"The assailant began firing into the assembled class from the stage -- from the front," Peters said. "It didn't seem like he was aiming. He just raised a gun and shot immediately," said Paul Sundstrom, a student who was sitting in the class with his brother Kevin when the gunman opened fire.
Kevin Sundstrom said, "He had [a] blank stare on his face, not a frown, not a grin, like there was nobody there. I went back to find Paul. He was reloading his gun, like he's in the backyard, methodically going about it." "I didn't think it was real, I went to [the] ground, asked a girl if it was for real. She said 'run!' I crawled and never looked back," said Kristina Balluff, another student who was also in the hall. "If he had [a] different gun, it would have been worse," said Kevin. Peters described the incident as a "very brief rapid-fire assault that ended with the gunman taking his own life."
An eyewitness told ABC News' Eileen Murphy that the shooter was a white male, about 5 feet, 9 inches, wearing a black beanie and a black coat, who had an ebony shotgun. He came in through the teacher's podium area and opened fire on 100 to 120 people who were attending the class. Grady said it appeared the gunman had acted alone.
Most of the victims were taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb, though some were airlifted elsewhere, including a female with a chest injury and two other victims with head injuries. All of the casualties were students, including the teaching assistant leading the class who was a graduate student, Peters said.
Today DeKalb County coroner Dennis J. Miller released the identities of the four victims who died in his county and said the gunman had "no record of police contact or prior arrest." George Gaynor, a senior geography student who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, told the student newspaper that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on," according to The Associated Press. "Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor told the AP just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."
Senior Desiree Smith left the lecture hall and ran to safety when the shooting began. "We realized everyone was crawling out so I started to Army crawl out of there," she said. Student Edward Robinson told WLS-TV in Chicago that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall. "It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at." Student Zach Seward saw teaching assistant Joe Peterson duck, "but that was all I saw," he said. "As I was running, I just kept waiting for something to hit me in the back. I didn't know where to run, tried to decide where it's safe to be, and there isn't anywhere safe."
At 3:20 p.m., the university posted an alert on its Web site warning students of a possible shooter. "Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear. Avoid the King Commons and all buildings in that vicinity," the Web site posting read. Thirty minutes later the site confirmed the shooting and said "several people" had been taken away by ambulance.
In December, the campus was closed for a day after a threat referred to April's Virginia Tech massacre, in which more than 30 people were killed, according to the Northern Star. Police established a perimeter around Cole Hall and 15 to 20 emergency vehicles were on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, according to the Daily Chronicle newspaper. More than 25,000 students are enrolled at the school, which is located 65 miles west of Chicago.
And that's why we're doing Assassins. There is nightmarish violence in our culture and we should be talking about it.
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Three dead in Louisiana
campus shooting
By Ruth Laney / Reuters
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana
A nursing student shot two women to death and killed herself in front of horrified classmates at a college in the southern U.S. state of Louisiana on Friday, Feb. 8, 2008, police said. Investigators still did not have a motive for the early morning killings at the Louisiana Technical College in the state capital, Baton Rouge, police spokesman L'Jean McKneely told Reuters.Details such as the names of the victims and the type of weapon used have not yet been released.
Blake Thibodeaux, 20, a drafting student at the college who was in a nearby classroom, said he heard what he initially thought was a door slamming and asked his teacher if he could investigate."I ran towards it and was at the door of the classroom when she shot off the last few rounds," he said, adding that the other students streamed in terror out of the room, many crying.
Police spent hours at the school gathering witness testimony and in the early afternoon were still not allowing people to enter the campus. Crowds of bystanders quietly milled around across the street.The shootings came just hours after a gunman killed two police officers and three city officials on Thursday night when he stormed into a city council meeting in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He was later shot dead by police.Mass shootings are not particularly rare in the United States, where the gun-ownership lobby is politically influential and gun control is far less strict than in many countries.
In the worst shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, a student with a history of mental illness killed 32 people at Virginia Tech university in April 2007 before turning one of his guns on himself.In December, a 19-year-old gunman in Omaha, Nebraska, killed eight people and then himself at a shopping mall. On Saturday, a man robbing a clothing store outside Chicago shot five women to death.
Gunman Planned Campus Shooting
for at Least Six Days
'Rapid-Fire Assault' in Lecture Hall Killed 5,
Wounded 16 Other Students
Feb. 15, 2008 — The gunman who fatally shot five students before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall likely planned his murder spree at least a week in advance, investigators said today.
The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday -- indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.
The gunman, Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a one-time undergraduate and award-winning sociology graduate student at NIU, was "revered by faculty and staff" and gave "no indication that this was the type of person who would engage in this activity," said campus Police Chief Donald Grady.
Kazmierczak had recently stopped taking his medication and "had become somewhat erratic," Grady told reporters.
The fifth student died this morning from gunshot wounds suffered when Kazmierczak opened fire Thursday afternoon at NIU in DeKalb, Ill.
The shooter fired 54 rounds from the weapons, killing six, including himself, and wounding 16. Kazmierczak, dressed in black, was armed with three handguns and a shotgun as students took cover beneath desks and ran out of the lecture hall. He was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. He carried the shotgun concealed in a guitar case and the handguns under his coat. He entered the hall through a door near the front of the room's stage. No note has been found and no motive is yet known, Grady said.
"We have no motive and I have no way of knowing what the motive was," he said. In all, there were 23 casualties in the shooting, including the gunman. Several of the victims were taken to hospitals, where three later died. The others, including the shooter, died at the scene of the gunfire. Police said he reloaded the shotgun in a shooting that lasted less than five minutes, before he took his own life. Police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the first reports, but it was too late to stop the gunman.
"There is no note or threat that I know of," NIU president John Peters told ABC News. "By all accounts that we can tell right now [he] was a very good student that the professors thought well of."
Law enforcement authorities told ABC News' Jack Date that Kazmierczak bought two weapons Saturday at a gun store in Champaign, Ill., a Remington 12-gauge shotgun and 9 mm Glock pistol. From the same firearms dealer, he obtained a Hi Point 380 pistol Dec. 30, 2007 and SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol Aug. 6, 2007. Kazmierczak had no police record, allowing him to qualify to buy the guns under the state's gun laws, sources said.
An Internet gun dealer based in Green Bay, Wis. who sold a weapon to Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho last year sold two empty 9 mm Glock magazines and a Glock holster to Kazmierczak, the company said in a statement. Kazmierczak received the accessories from topglock.com, owned by TGSCOM Inc., on Tuesday, two days before the shooting. It remains unknown if the accessories were used in the shooting.
Good StudentBy all accounts Kazmierczak was a good student. Serving as a member of the NIU Academic Criminal Justice Association and a teaching aid as an undergraduate. In 2006 he received a Dean's Award from the sociology department. Kazmierczak's father, Robert, lives in Lakeland, Fla., and his mother died in September 2006. The shooting occurred during an introductory geology class at the university's Cole Hall in the campus center around 3:15 p.m. About 163 students were registered for the class.
"The assailant began firing into the assembled class from the stage -- from the front," Peters said. "It didn't seem like he was aiming. He just raised a gun and shot immediately," said Paul Sundstrom, a student who was sitting in the class with his brother Kevin when the gunman opened fire.
Kevin Sundstrom said, "He had [a] blank stare on his face, not a frown, not a grin, like there was nobody there. I went back to find Paul. He was reloading his gun, like he's in the backyard, methodically going about it." "I didn't think it was real, I went to [the] ground, asked a girl if it was for real. She said 'run!' I crawled and never looked back," said Kristina Balluff, another student who was also in the hall. "If he had [a] different gun, it would have been worse," said Kevin. Peters described the incident as a "very brief rapid-fire assault that ended with the gunman taking his own life."
An eyewitness told ABC News' Eileen Murphy that the shooter was a white male, about 5 feet, 9 inches, wearing a black beanie and a black coat, who had an ebony shotgun. He came in through the teacher's podium area and opened fire on 100 to 120 people who were attending the class. Grady said it appeared the gunman had acted alone.
Most of the victims were taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb, though some were airlifted elsewhere, including a female with a chest injury and two other victims with head injuries. All of the casualties were students, including the teaching assistant leading the class who was a graduate student, Peters said.
Today DeKalb County coroner Dennis J. Miller released the identities of the four victims who died in his county and said the gunman had "no record of police contact or prior arrest." George Gaynor, a senior geography student who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, told the student newspaper that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on," according to The Associated Press. "Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor told the AP just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."
Senior Desiree Smith left the lecture hall and ran to safety when the shooting began. "We realized everyone was crawling out so I started to Army crawl out of there," she said. Student Edward Robinson told WLS-TV in Chicago that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall. "It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at." Student Zach Seward saw teaching assistant Joe Peterson duck, "but that was all I saw," he said. "As I was running, I just kept waiting for something to hit me in the back. I didn't know where to run, tried to decide where it's safe to be, and there isn't anywhere safe."
At 3:20 p.m., the university posted an alert on its Web site warning students of a possible shooter. "Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear. Avoid the King Commons and all buildings in that vicinity," the Web site posting read. Thirty minutes later the site confirmed the shooting and said "several people" had been taken away by ambulance.
In December, the campus was closed for a day after a threat referred to April's Virginia Tech massacre, in which more than 30 people were killed, according to the Northern Star. Police established a perimeter around Cole Hall and 15 to 20 emergency vehicles were on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, according to the Daily Chronicle newspaper. More than 25,000 students are enrolled at the school, which is located 65 miles west of Chicago.
And that's why we're doing Assassins. There is nightmarish violence in our culture and we should be talking about it.
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
I Deserve a Fucking Prize
I'm so proud of this show. We haven't even had a full run-through yet and I just know how good it's going to be. It's such a joy to work on material this strong, this artful, and this ballsy. Yes, friends, you heard me... read me... right.
Assassins is a musical with balls.
Big ones.
And in stark contrast to that, I just read online that Shrek the Musical is about to open on Broadway. Pardon me while I cut myself. Just what we need, yet another brain-dead musical built on gags. Another gag musical. Another pussy musical. One without balls. Like we don't have enough right now. Spamalot, The Producers, Young Frankenstein... will somebody smother Mel Brooks already??? He's giving my art form a bad name! Again!
Am I the only one who's noticed that the American Muscial Theatre, that great adventurous creature, has regressed 100 years backward? Gag musicals is how the art form started, around 1901, with the George M. Cohan musicals. Back then, all musicals were gag musicals.
Those early Cohan musicals were terrific for their times and their audiences, but shouldn't we have progressed just a bit in a whole damn century? It was the century that brought us Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein and Kander & Ebb and William Finn and so many other geniuses making ever more amazing and surprising theatre art. And now we're gonna go backward?
No, say I! No, and I'll say it again!
We will show the world that great art is better than silly shit -- funnier, wilder, more adventurous, more surprising. We'll show them that Stephen Sondheim is a better theatre composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber. We won't put art away in the closet or embalm it so that it never changes. We will thrill you with art. We will assault you with art. We will freak you out and make you laugh with art.
You will make friends with art.
Can you tell I'm stoned?
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Assassins is a musical with balls.
Big ones.
And in stark contrast to that, I just read online that Shrek the Musical is about to open on Broadway. Pardon me while I cut myself. Just what we need, yet another brain-dead musical built on gags. Another gag musical. Another pussy musical. One without balls. Like we don't have enough right now. Spamalot, The Producers, Young Frankenstein... will somebody smother Mel Brooks already??? He's giving my art form a bad name! Again!
Am I the only one who's noticed that the American Muscial Theatre, that great adventurous creature, has regressed 100 years backward? Gag musicals is how the art form started, around 1901, with the George M. Cohan musicals. Back then, all musicals were gag musicals.
Those early Cohan musicals were terrific for their times and their audiences, but shouldn't we have progressed just a bit in a whole damn century? It was the century that brought us Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein and Kander & Ebb and William Finn and so many other geniuses making ever more amazing and surprising theatre art. And now we're gonna go backward?
No, say I! No, and I'll say it again!
We will show the world that great art is better than silly shit -- funnier, wilder, more adventurous, more surprising. We'll show them that Stephen Sondheim is a better theatre composer than Andrew Lloyd Webber. We won't put art away in the closet or embalm it so that it never changes. We will thrill you with art. We will assault you with art. We will freak you out and make you laugh with art.
You will make friends with art.
Can you tell I'm stoned?
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Unworthy of Your Love
I'm about two-thirds of the way through Martin Scorcese's brilliant film Taxi Driver. It's the story of a lonely guy who ultimately chooses political assassination. It's the movie John Hinckley saw fifteen times.
One of the film's producers, Michael Phillips, says in one of the DVD featurettes that this story is "a glimpse inside the soul of a man in pain." I can't imagine a better description. That's exactly what this movie is. And of course, that's what Hinckley needed most, to know that someone else felt like he did, that someone else understood his loneliness and his emptiness, his rejection, all of it. He knew that the people who made this movie understood him! Knowing now as much as I do about Hinckley, it's spooky to watch Taxi Driver and see how close they came to his life. It must've felt to him like someone was throwing him a lifesaver.
In a way, it reminds me of my own experience with Harvey Fierstein's movie Torch Song Trilogy. I remember when it first came out, I saw it at the Hi-Pointe five times in two weeks. I didn't know at the time why I needed this movie so much, but looking back, I can now see that it's because this was the first time I had seen a movie portray gay people in terms of love and romance and marriage instead of in terms of sex. I saw that movie and realized for the first time that someone else felt like I did about life and love. It was very reassuring.
When I watch Taxi Driver now in the context of Assassins, I just know that it was the same for Hinckley and I know how important an experience like that can be. In my case, it just comforted me, but in Hinckley's case it also suggested a plan of action. He actually tried to become Travis Bickle, the film's "hero," wanting to rescue Jodie Foster, shooting a political figure...
It's very weird seeing this movie again and experiencing in a new way this very sad story of a very lonely man. I think now I understand Hinckley more deeply than I did before. And I see pieces of myself in both Travis Bickle and Hinckley (at least as he is in the show). We all have those scared, lonely places. We all feel unappreciated, even ignored, at some point in our life. I watch this movie and I think about our show and I wonder to myself what were the variables that kept me from becoming Travis Bickle or John Hinckley? Why did they turn out so fucked up and I turned out... well, maybe a little fucked up, but not at least not shooting anybody...
But don't cross me...
I've asked a lot of the actors in Assassins to try going down unexpected paths with their characters, to look for things other productions (including ours) haven't paid attention to. With Hinckely, we're choosing not a radically different path, just one of slightly darker focus. Instead of just playing him as a loser/slacker, an object of ridicule, I've asked Jeff to let the audience really feel his deep sadness and pain, to let Hinckley be a human being, to let the audience care about him. In the book depository scene, Booth quotes that famous quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That's Hinckley's life -- until he finds his place as a force of history with the other assassins.
The shooting of Reagan in the show has to be Hinckley's great "triumph." He has come from this terrible sadness, this desperation to prove himself, to be worth something (hence the title of his song, "Unworthy of Your Love"). He knows that if Jodie Foster actually ever met him in person she'd dismiss him like everybody else does. But this act -- shooting the President -- might change that equation. It could prove that he's strong, not weak; powerful, not impotent. It is truly the act of a desperate man, a lashing out at the world. In those few gunshots, we see the full force and fury of all these years of abuse and ridicule, the full explosion of all those complicated, destructive emotions...
Strangely, the act of assassination itself (successful or not) seems to take each assassin character from the concrete, physical world to the metaphysical world of the show. Here they can address the audience, they can sing and comment upon the action... or even about the evils of capitalism in regard to gun manufacture...
Once they have committed the unspeakable act, they transform to a higher level of enlightenment and understanding, the place where we meet them and from which they watch the show. Here in this world, the assassins become the "zen assassins," no longer plagued by the difficulties and disabilities of the physical world; no, here they are their higher selves. (There's a smiliar moment when Dot appears in the last scene of Sunday in the Park with George). The assassins recount for us their stories, but they also can see both back and forward with equal clarity. Individually, in life, they meant very little; but together in the world of Assassins, they are a force of history. Only together are they interesting enough for a Sondheim musical.
Heavy shit. Somebody roll me a fatty!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
One of the film's producers, Michael Phillips, says in one of the DVD featurettes that this story is "a glimpse inside the soul of a man in pain." I can't imagine a better description. That's exactly what this movie is. And of course, that's what Hinckley needed most, to know that someone else felt like he did, that someone else understood his loneliness and his emptiness, his rejection, all of it. He knew that the people who made this movie understood him! Knowing now as much as I do about Hinckley, it's spooky to watch Taxi Driver and see how close they came to his life. It must've felt to him like someone was throwing him a lifesaver.
In a way, it reminds me of my own experience with Harvey Fierstein's movie Torch Song Trilogy. I remember when it first came out, I saw it at the Hi-Pointe five times in two weeks. I didn't know at the time why I needed this movie so much, but looking back, I can now see that it's because this was the first time I had seen a movie portray gay people in terms of love and romance and marriage instead of in terms of sex. I saw that movie and realized for the first time that someone else felt like I did about life and love. It was very reassuring.
When I watch Taxi Driver now in the context of Assassins, I just know that it was the same for Hinckley and I know how important an experience like that can be. In my case, it just comforted me, but in Hinckley's case it also suggested a plan of action. He actually tried to become Travis Bickle, the film's "hero," wanting to rescue Jodie Foster, shooting a political figure...
It's very weird seeing this movie again and experiencing in a new way this very sad story of a very lonely man. I think now I understand Hinckley more deeply than I did before. And I see pieces of myself in both Travis Bickle and Hinckley (at least as he is in the show). We all have those scared, lonely places. We all feel unappreciated, even ignored, at some point in our life. I watch this movie and I think about our show and I wonder to myself what were the variables that kept me from becoming Travis Bickle or John Hinckley? Why did they turn out so fucked up and I turned out... well, maybe a little fucked up, but not at least not shooting anybody...
But don't cross me...
I've asked a lot of the actors in Assassins to try going down unexpected paths with their characters, to look for things other productions (including ours) haven't paid attention to. With Hinckely, we're choosing not a radically different path, just one of slightly darker focus. Instead of just playing him as a loser/slacker, an object of ridicule, I've asked Jeff to let the audience really feel his deep sadness and pain, to let Hinckley be a human being, to let the audience care about him. In the book depository scene, Booth quotes that famous quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That's Hinckley's life -- until he finds his place as a force of history with the other assassins.
The shooting of Reagan in the show has to be Hinckley's great "triumph." He has come from this terrible sadness, this desperation to prove himself, to be worth something (hence the title of his song, "Unworthy of Your Love"). He knows that if Jodie Foster actually ever met him in person she'd dismiss him like everybody else does. But this act -- shooting the President -- might change that equation. It could prove that he's strong, not weak; powerful, not impotent. It is truly the act of a desperate man, a lashing out at the world. In those few gunshots, we see the full force and fury of all these years of abuse and ridicule, the full explosion of all those complicated, destructive emotions...
Strangely, the act of assassination itself (successful or not) seems to take each assassin character from the concrete, physical world to the metaphysical world of the show. Here they can address the audience, they can sing and comment upon the action... or even about the evils of capitalism in regard to gun manufacture...
Once they have committed the unspeakable act, they transform to a higher level of enlightenment and understanding, the place where we meet them and from which they watch the show. Here in this world, the assassins become the "zen assassins," no longer plagued by the difficulties and disabilities of the physical world; no, here they are their higher selves. (There's a smiliar moment when Dot appears in the last scene of Sunday in the Park with George). The assassins recount for us their stories, but they also can see both back and forward with equal clarity. Individually, in life, they meant very little; but together in the world of Assassins, they are a force of history. Only together are they interesting enough for a Sondheim musical.
Heavy shit. Somebody roll me a fatty!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
And That's the Truth
"The only theatre worth saving, the only theatre worth having, is a theatre motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every trace of the photographic attitude of mind, when we succeed in making a production that is the exact antithesis of a motion picture, a production that is everything a motion picture is not and nothing a motion picture is, the old lost magic will return once more. The realistic theatre, we may remember, is less than a hundred years old. But the theatre -- great theatre, world theatre -- is far older than that, so many centuries older that by comparison it makes our little candid-camera theatre seem like something that was thought up only the day before yesterday."
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
-- Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
