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petzipellepingoIs 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... )
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... )
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Nov. 4th, 2020 05:02 ampetzipellepingoA Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished
Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.
By Jesse Green
How do you top “West Side Story”?
If you’re Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, the answer is: You don’t.
( Read more... )
Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.
By Jesse Green
How do you top “West Side Story”?
If you’re Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, the answer is: You don’t.
( Read more... )
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Feb. 24th, 2020 03:19 pmpetzipellepingoJerome Robbins: You’re Missed in This ‘West Side Story,’ Daddy-o
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s dances for the Broadway revival swarm and sweep, but Robbins’s choreography was something more central: the libretto.
By Gia Kourlas
Do you miss the finger snap? The new “West Side Story” has retired it. But that generation-defining gesture isn’t just the stale move of a 1950s beatnik. In the original production, based on a conception by Jerome Robbins, it set more than the beat. It was the tone, the vivacity, the pulse behind dancing that articulated the raw physicality of rage, of yearning, of love — emotions contained within a group of youthful bodies on a hot summer night.
( Read more... )
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s dances for the Broadway revival swarm and sweep, but Robbins’s choreography was something more central: the libretto.
By Gia Kourlas
Do you miss the finger snap? The new “West Side Story” has retired it. But that generation-defining gesture isn’t just the stale move of a 1950s beatnik. In the original production, based on a conception by Jerome Robbins, it set more than the beat. It was the tone, the vivacity, the pulse behind dancing that articulated the raw physicality of rage, of yearning, of love — emotions contained within a group of youthful bodies on a hot summer night.
( Read more... )
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Apr. 14th, 2019 06:27 ampetzipellepingoI'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... )
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Jan. 30th, 2019 09:11 ampetzipellepingoReview: An Aching Ode to Jerome Robbins’s Lost New York
For this essential New York choreographer’s centenary, a Public Library exhibition full of the joy and anxiety of postwar Manhattan.
By Jason Farago
Sometime in the early 1940s, before he became the choreographer who shaped American movement, Jerome Robbins made a little home movie on a New York rooftop. He’s goofing around, trying out a few spins and pliés.
His mother comes on to dance too; she and her son balance on one leg on the rooftop’s ledge, then he gives her a ginger twirl in a sweet, familial pas de deux. Then his father enters the picture, squatting and spinning while Jerome kicks his legs like in a Russian folk dance.
In Europe and Asia the war is raging, and the unthinkable is taking place in Jewish villages like the one his parents fled. But New York is a different world. Robbins, up on the roof, goes into an energetic solo, ending with two fast pirouettes, and then looks right at the camera with a grin that says, “If you can make it here …”
That sky-high dance is the charming preface to “Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York,” on view now at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This centenary exhibition — Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, in October 1918 — draws heavily on resources he bequeathed to the library, and swells with preparatory materials for ballets like “Fancy Free” and musicals like “West Side Story,” as well as reams of anxious diary entries and notes to self.
( Read more... )
For this essential New York choreographer’s centenary, a Public Library exhibition full of the joy and anxiety of postwar Manhattan.
By Jason Farago
Sometime in the early 1940s, before he became the choreographer who shaped American movement, Jerome Robbins made a little home movie on a New York rooftop. He’s goofing around, trying out a few spins and pliés.
His mother comes on to dance too; she and her son balance on one leg on the rooftop’s ledge, then he gives her a ginger twirl in a sweet, familial pas de deux. Then his father enters the picture, squatting and spinning while Jerome kicks his legs like in a Russian folk dance.
In Europe and Asia the war is raging, and the unthinkable is taking place in Jewish villages like the one his parents fled. But New York is a different world. Robbins, up on the roof, goes into an energetic solo, ending with two fast pirouettes, and then looks right at the camera with a grin that says, “If you can make it here …”
That sky-high dance is the charming preface to “Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York,” on view now at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This centenary exhibition — Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, in October 1918 — draws heavily on resources he bequeathed to the library, and swells with preparatory materials for ballets like “Fancy Free” and musicals like “West Side Story,” as well as reams of anxious diary entries and notes to self.
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Jun. 18th, 2018 07:30 ampetzipellepingoReview Roundup: What Did The Critics Think Of The Muny's JEROME ROBBINS' BROADWAY?
by BWW News Desk
In its first staging ever in the world since its original Broadway production and tour, Jerome Robbins' Broadway is an epic musical anthology that honors the career highlights of Tony Award-winning director and choreographer, Jerome Robbins. Filled with mesmerizing production numbers from some of Robbins' biggest hits, including West Side Story, On the Town, Peter Pan, The King and I and Fiddler on the Roof.
( Read more... )
by BWW News Desk
In its first staging ever in the world since its original Broadway production and tour, Jerome Robbins' Broadway is an epic musical anthology that honors the career highlights of Tony Award-winning director and choreographer, Jerome Robbins. Filled with mesmerizing production numbers from some of Robbins' biggest hits, including West Side Story, On the Town, Peter Pan, The King and I and Fiddler on the Roof.
( Read more... )
petzipellepingo“A collaboration as frequent and close as theirs is a marriage,” says Sondheim. “As a collaborator I’ve had a lot of marriages. That’s exactly what’s involved.” Bernstein and Robbins admired and antagonized each other, exhilarated and wounded each other, loved and at times hated each other. They were both, Jerry wrote in his journal, oversensitive and insensitive: “he scared of me & me feeling he always put me down.” Yet neither one ever thought to let this artistic marriage go. At their best, they completed each other.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
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Jun. 5th, 2018 01:24 pmpetzipellepingoLeonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and the Road to West Side Story
When Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins met 75 years ago, they were young men hungry for their Big Break. Little did they know their partnership would make waves for decades to come.
by LAURA JACOBS
In 1947, the photographer Irving Penn made a black-and-white portrait of a young American musician. He is seated on drab carpeting draped over a chaise-like shape, vaguely old-world. The carpet’s mossy folds throw luxuriant shadows, and the musician upon them wears white tie and tails, a black overcoat caping his shoulders. He is relaxed, his left elbow propped on his left leg, which is hitched up on the seat, and his left cheekbone resting in his left hand as he gazes into the camera. His only visible ear, the right, is large—and as centrally positioned in the portrait as middle C. Is this a fin de siècle poet dressed for the theater? Is that a cigarette butt lying on the floor? Leonard Bernstein never looked more beautiful.
( Read more... )
When Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins met 75 years ago, they were young men hungry for their Big Break. Little did they know their partnership would make waves for decades to come.
by LAURA JACOBS
In 1947, the photographer Irving Penn made a black-and-white portrait of a young American musician. He is seated on drab carpeting draped over a chaise-like shape, vaguely old-world. The carpet’s mossy folds throw luxuriant shadows, and the musician upon them wears white tie and tails, a black overcoat caping his shoulders. He is relaxed, his left elbow propped on his left leg, which is hitched up on the seat, and his left cheekbone resting in his left hand as he gazes into the camera. His only visible ear, the right, is large—and as centrally positioned in the portrait as middle C. Is this a fin de siècle poet dressed for the theater? Is that a cigarette butt lying on the floor? Leonard Bernstein never looked more beautiful.
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Apr. 29th, 2018 05:50 ampetzipellepingoJerome Robbins, Ballet’s Mr.‘Take It Easy, Baby,’ at 100
Our chief dance critic on this great theater maker and his particularly American style of ballet, which weeded out artifice and embraced naturalism.
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Theater does not consist of words alone. And much of what can be sublime in theater goes beyond words. It is true that all the great choreographers are also among the great makers of theater — perhaps especially when they move furthest from words and narrative. But nobody has demonstrated this point more substantially than Jerome Robbins.
( Read more... )
Our chief dance critic on this great theater maker and his particularly American style of ballet, which weeded out artifice and embraced naturalism.
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Theater does not consist of words alone. And much of what can be sublime in theater goes beyond words. It is true that all the great choreographers are also among the great makers of theater — perhaps especially when they move furthest from words and narrative. But nobody has demonstrated this point more substantially than Jerome Robbins.
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Jan. 23rd, 2017 05:54 ampetzipellepingoMartha Swope, 88, Who Etched Dance and Theater History in Photographs, Dies
By SYLVIANE GOLD
Martha Swope, whose crisp, compelling photographs of dancers and actors at work recorded nearly half a century of stage history, died on Thursday in New York. She was 88.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Jeanne Fuchs, her longtime friend and executor.
From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of “West Side Story,” to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of “La Cage Aux Folles” in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever.
( Read more... )
By SYLVIANE GOLD
Martha Swope, whose crisp, compelling photographs of dancers and actors at work recorded nearly half a century of stage history, died on Thursday in New York. She was 88.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Jeanne Fuchs, her longtime friend and executor.
From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of “West Side Story,” to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of “La Cage Aux Folles” in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever.
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Jun. 4th, 2016 04:30 pmpetzipellepingoWest Side Story : Geniuses at Work
By Dennis Razze
“The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning.”
This was the opening line of Walter Kerr’s review of the opening night performance of West Side Story published in the New York Herald Tribune on September 27, 1957. To Kerr, the impact of the musical was as if an atomic bomb dropped on Manhattan—West Side Story certainly changed the American musical forever.
( Read more... )
By Dennis Razze
“The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning.”
This was the opening line of Walter Kerr’s review of the opening night performance of West Side Story published in the New York Herald Tribune on September 27, 1957. To Kerr, the impact of the musical was as if an atomic bomb dropped on Manhattan—West Side Story certainly changed the American musical forever.
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Feb. 12th, 2016 04:29 pmpetzipellepingo West Side Story: Storytelling Through Dance
Jerome Robbins translated the tensions between the Sharks and the Jets into dance. Discover how this master choreographed West Side Story in the free online course we made with Soundfly.
The Dance of West Side Story
West Side Story’s opening sequence is told entirely without words, through dance and music. Discover how choreographer Jerome Robbins used dance to convey the tensions and feuds of the story in our free Soundfly course
Jerome Robbins translated the tensions between the Sharks and the Jets into dance. Discover how this master choreographed West Side Story in the free online course we made with Soundfly.
The Dance of West Side Story
West Side Story’s opening sequence is told entirely without words, through dance and music. Discover how choreographer Jerome Robbins used dance to convey the tensions and feuds of the story in our free Soundfly course
(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2015 03:36 pmpetzipellepingoWonders in the Dark
by Sam Juliano
The film of West Side Story produces the same brilliant effect as the play. This does not mean that the stage show has merely been duplicated; on the contrary, to get the same effect, it had to be effectively translated into a second medium. Because of the quality of the original materials and of the translation, the result is the best film musical ever made. -Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic
West Side Story, a cultural institution with a legacy to match any American film in the musical genre or otherwise, is also a curiosity. ( Read more... )
by Sam Juliano
The film of West Side Story produces the same brilliant effect as the play. This does not mean that the stage show has merely been duplicated; on the contrary, to get the same effect, it had to be effectively translated into a second medium. Because of the quality of the original materials and of the translation, the result is the best film musical ever made. -Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic
West Side Story, a cultural institution with a legacy to match any American film in the musical genre or otherwise, is also a curiosity. ( Read more... )
