#the theatre

[literally-online]

i went to go see THE MENU last night and my favorite part was when they were serving the first beautifully extravagant course in the movie my waiter in the theater showed up and loudly said “mozzarella sticks” and everyone around me laughed

[elsewhereuniversity]

To the person who ran through the lobby of the PoliSci building screaming Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse I hope you know there’s a red supergiant currently blocking a major part of the walkway and now we have to get the Dean and the head of the theater department and its become this whole song and dance and it’s all your fault

Theatre kids :/

[slack-wise]

Printer go brrrrr

[cavalierfou]

1/3 page from a google docs template titled "Yellow Skies & Blue Sunflowers", which I've recently released for my Theatre Tier on Deviantart! Subbing earns you access to many downloadable resources with no additional fee ✨ If you're interested, you can visit the page right here !

[artdecoandmodernist]

Clothes and the Car... At the Theatre for Vogue, Photo by Sir Cecil Beaton, 1927.

[beetlezbonez]

doodle Herobrines group

[lisamarie-vee]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"The sad truth is that musicals are the only public art form reviewed mostly by ignoramuses. Books are reviewed by writers, the visual arts by disappointed, if knowledgeable, painters and art students, concert music by composers and would-be composers. Plays, at least in this country, are reviewed by people who don't know de Montherlant from de Ghelderode and couldn't care less, whose knowledge is comprised of what they read in Variety and gossip columns, and who know nothing, of course, about music. Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publicly criticized by illiterates."

Stephen Sondheim has stated that his original ambition was to become a mathematician and that he became a composer largely by chance. A big influence was the fact that famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (of Rodgers & Hammerstein) was a neighbor of his when Sondheim was a boy. When he wrote a musical for a school production, he showed it to Hammerstein who told him it was the worst musical he had ever read. However, Hammerstein also told him that nonetheless it showed a lot of latent talent and proceeded to tell him everything that was wrong with it and how to fix it, for which Sondheim was always grateful.

"Oscar Hammerstein had urged me to write from my own sensibility, but at that time I had no sensibility, no take on the world. My voice snuck up on me. I started to develop an attitude in 'Saturday Night,' a laconic lyrical style in 'Gypsy' and a structurally experimental musical one in 'Anyone Can Whistle.' They all came together in full-throated fruition in 'Company.' 'Oh,' I thought at the end of the opening number, 'that's who I am.' From then on I could afford to try anything, because I knew I had a home base that was mine alone and that would inform everything I would write, good and bad."

"Just before he died, he gave me a picture of himself and I asked him to inscribe it, which is sort of odd because he was a surrogate father to me, it's like asking your father to inscribe a picture. And he thought for a minute, and he was clearly a little embarrassed. And then he got a smile on his face, like the cat had just eaten the cream. And he wrote something. And when he left the room, I looked at it. And it said 'For Stevey, my friend and teacher.' That's a measure of Oscar. He wrote a lyric, as a matter of fact, in 'The King and I' -'By your pupils, you are taught.' He was a remarkable fellow."

A musical based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee was a project of producer David Merrick and actress Ethel Merman. Merrick had read a chapter of Lee's memoirs in Harper's Magazine and approached Lee to obtain the rights. Jerome Robbins was interested, and wanted Leland Hayward as co-producer; Merman also wanted Hayward to produce her next show. Merrick and Hayward approached Arthur Laurents to write the book. As he relates, Laurents initially was not interested until he saw that the story was one of parents living their children's lives. Composers Irving Berlin and Cole Porter declined the project. Finally, Robbins asked Sondheim, who agreed to do it (Sondheim had worked with Robbins and Laurents on the musical "West Side Story"). However, Merman did not want an "unknown" composer, and wanted Jule Styne to write the music. Although Sondheim initially refused to write only the lyrics, he was persuaded by Hammerstein to accept the job.

"Gypsy" opened on Broadway in May of 1959, and is frequently considered one of the crowning achievements of the mid-twentieth century's conventional musical theatre art form, often called the book musical. "Gypsy" has been referred to as the greatest American musical by numerous critics and writers, among them Ben Brantley ("what may be the greatest of all American musicals...") and Frank Rich. The role of Mama Rose was played by Rosalind Russell in the 1962 film version; the closest Merman got to recreating her stage success on the big screen was in the hospital scene in "Airplane!" (1980) (she starts belting out "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and has to be sedated).

Sondheim on the song 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' from "Gypsy": "The difficulty was to find a way to say 'Things are going to be better than ever' without being flatly colloquial on the one hand or fancifully imagistic on the other. I was proud of the solution, and especially so when I picked up the New York Times one morning in 1968 and read the first sentence in the leading editorial: 'Everything is not coming up roses in Vietnam.' I had passed a phrase into the English language." (IMDb/Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, Stephen Sondheim!

Cinema Shorthand Society

[kitchenknickers]

the fact that some people have cedric grolet dessert tables at functions fills me with jealousy like…

[transxfiles]

cant talk rn obsessed over the design concept of this 2017 production of pinocchio as a stage play where pinocchio is the only character played by a human actor and the rest of the cast are portrayed as puppets ,,,

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

[elsewhereuniversity]

how will the rest of my show go? i work as wardrobe crew

Given the lead actor's foray into Autumn Court politics in recent weeks, and the subsequent messy fall-out of his split from his patron/girlfriend just the other day, and her arrival to the show during intermission with a half-dozen somber, masked, rapier-bearing guards in tow, I would say 'bad'. If you're able to, I'd try to swap his prop blade out for something with a little more defensive power.

[pbnmj]

THE NOIR-HOBIE INTERACTIONS THAT I MADE UP IN MY MIND ARE VERY REAL TO ME. SONY PLEASE PICK UP WHAT I’M PUTTING DOWN!!!

[cavalierfou]

VANITAS – template available in The Theatre tier on Deviantart!

animated and static versions are both included, along with an optional coloring.

the fonts you need before editing are Aqala Display, Bodoni 72 Oldstyle and Microsoft Himalaya.

please remember to credit me if you use this template!

download this template here or visit the tier page here!

[susiephone]

*puts hands on hollywood exec's shoulders, staring unblinking into their eyes* listen to me. you will never get people who hate musicals to like musicals by making your musical less of a musical. if you hide the fact that your film is a musical in the advertising, you're going to get a lot of low ratings from people who hate musicals and went into your movie not expecting a musical and got one anyway. people who hate musicals will hate them no matter how realistic and diegetic and lowkey you try to make it. they will hate musicals even if you completely excise anything complicated, over the top, silly, or even slightly challenging. they will hate musicals even if you cut half the songs. they will hate musicals even if you cast that a-lister who can't sing worth a damn. stop trying to market to people who hate musicals. they're a lost cause. your audience should be people who love musicals. this half-assed middle ground pisses off both camps. just embrace the fact that your movie is a musical. lean into it. don't try and trick musical haters into coming to your film when you could be marketing to the theater kids. better cringe than a coward.