westsidestory

Is It Finally Twilight for the Theater’s Sacred Monsters?
Many of the “great men” who helped America create its classics, its institutions and its own acting style were tyrants. We need to cut them loose.

By Jesse Green

Despotic. Agonizing. Crippling. Sadistic.

Those are just some of the adjectives victims use to describe their tormentors in Isaac Butler’s jaw-dropping book “The Method.”

But the method they’re talking about isn’t a blueprint for a fascist takeover or C.I.A. interrogation. It’s a blueprint for the American theater.

“The Method,” which bears the subtitle “How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” is the story of how the precepts of Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor, director and theorist born in 1863, were interpreted in the United States by some very vicious teachers — mostly men — whose behavior now looks outrageous to us. By comparison, Stanislavski himself was a pussycat, even though he berated his longtime leading actress, Olga Knipper, the wife of Chekhov, so cruelly she came to call him a “monster.”
( Read more... )

I've been reading The Leonard Bernstein Letters and while there really isn't much in letter form due to the fact that the foursome worked together on a daily basis there is something very interesting in the book. ( Read more... )

Brash, Confident and Democratic: How Bernstein Symbolized America
Five writers on what made the protean Bernstein, born 100 years ago, one of the most indelible figures in the history of the arts.

A man, a country and an era came together in Leonard Bernstein, the musician of the American century.

After 150 years of insecurity as this country gazed across the sea at the edifices of European culture, here was the New World finally in command. Composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, television personality, star, Bernstein — a Jew, crucially, just a few years after the Holocaust — marched Mahler back into Vienna, a second wave of liberation, a musical Marshall Plan. Bold, maybe a little brash; tender, maybe a little sentimental; difficult to work with yet desperate to please: Bernstein’s qualities were America’s, too.
( Read more... )

Letters Show Leonard Bernstein Almost Walked Away From WEST SIDE STORY

by BWW News Desk

The Guardian writes that a new collection of letters by famed composer Leonard Bernstein -- Nigel Simeone's Leonard Bernstein Letters, set to debut next month -- reveal the composer's 'hostility' for WEST SIDE STORY book writer Arthur Laurents. Bernstein even considered walking away from the project, according to one of the letters.
( Read more... )

A new canción for ‘West Side Story’

LINDSAY CHRISTIANS | The Capital Times

For two years in the late 1950s, “West Side Story” electrified Broadway audiences, recasting Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets as troubled teenagers on New York’s upper west side.

But for the musical’s fiftieth anniversary, changes outside the theater made revivals of “West Side” seem dated. In 2009, the late Arthur Laurents, then 93, transformed the show by making it darker and more violent; addition, the Puerto Rican characters speak Spanish.
( Read more... )