A New Sound On Broadway

Who says Broadway doesn't adjust to changes in musical taste? Holler If Ya Hear Me, a new musical based on the music of late rapper Tupac Shakur, also known by his stage names 2Pac and briefly as Makaveli, will premiere on Broadway at the Palace Theatre May 26 under the direction of Tony Award nominee Kenny Leon.

Tracy Letts Nominated for Writers Guild of America Award

Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" has been nominated by The Writers Guild of America for outstanding achievement in writing for the screen during 2013. Winners will be honored at the 2014 Writers Guild Awards Feb. 1 at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles at the JW Marriott L.A. LIVE and New York City at the Edison Ballroom. Also nominated in that category are "Before Midnight," written by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke; "Captain Phillips," screenplay by Billy Ray; "Lone Survivor," written by Peter Berg; and "The Wolf of Wall Street," screenplay by Terence Winter. The Writers Guild Awards honor "outstanding writing in film, television, new media, videogames, news, radio, promotional, and graphic animation categories."

Motto

"What's past is prologue."

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Four words, and an admirable sentence. Short, precise, meaningfull. Coined by a genius.

Keep It Short!

“When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”

William Strunk Jr.

Writers Must Be Merciless

The British writer Arthur Quiller-Couch said it bluntly: "Kill your darlings!" When we fall in love with our words we may end up writing something bad. America's famous teacher of style, William Strunk, stated: "Vigorous writing is concise... A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." My late father, a journalist and a gifted illustrator, spent days bent over his drawing paper, redrawing the same picture over and over again as he tried to reduce the lines needed. It took me a life of writing to understand why he did this.

Cookies For The Performers

Schmackary's is a beautiful coffeeshop with bakery in Manhattan (362 West 45th Street). It's not only a place to go before or after a show, you can also send a thank-you gift from there to the people that etertained you. Specialized on delivering respectively preferred cookies backstage to any Broadway theater they keep cast and crew favorites on file.

Digital Theatre

Only now did I find out about the web page Digital Theatre which offers live films of some interesting British theatre productions for download. Among others, the West End revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Olivier Award winner Maria Friedman. That revival premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory in fall 2012 and began its West End engagement April 23 at the Harold Pinter Theatre for a limited run through July 27. Digital Theatre also offers plays, operas and ballett performances.

Joe Allen's Wall

There is a wall in Joe Allen's West 46th Street restaurant that commemorates Broadway flops, among them notorious failures like Breakfast At Tiffany's and Carey. Joe just refused to hang a poster of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in the restaurant's dining room. Although Spider-Man will have racked up losses of up to $60 million by the time it closes on January 4, the show does not qualify because it ran for three years. I can say with pride that one my shows, Dance Of The Vampires, has made it to Joe Allen's wall. It's no small achievement to have licked the mighty Spider Man.

Stephen Schwartz Goes To Vienna

Stephen Schwartz' musical “Wicked” set a Broadway record for the highest one-week gross, taking in $3,201,333 for the week ending Dec. 29. The show becomes the first Broadway show to gross over $3 million in one week. (It broke the previous record of $2,947,172, which it also held, for the week ending Dec. 30, 2012.)  In a new project he will compose the score for “Schikaneder,” a German-language musical about the creative and sometimes tempestuous relationship between Emanuel Schikaneder, the 18th- and 19th-century impresario, composer, librettist and singer, and his wife and sometime business partner, Eleonore. The work will have a libretto by Christian Struppeck, the general artistic director of the Raimund and Ronacher Theaters in Vienna. It is scheduled to have its premiere at one of the theaters during the 2015-16 season. Opera fans will immediately recognize Schikaneder as the librettist of Mozart’s 1791 opera “The Magic Flute,” who also sang Papageno in the original production. Schikaneder was a character in the interationally successful musical "Mozart!" by Sylvester Levay and Yours Truly, so we regard this project as a spin-off of our show. May it become as awesome as "Wicked".

HAL Is Waiting In The Wings

One of the things the year 2014 will bring is a tiny chip. It will be able to automate tasks that until now require painstaking programming. Thanks to that chip computers will be able to learn from their own mistakes and adjust to new information. This change in technology is based on the biological nervous system. The chip emulates the way neurons react to stimuli and exchange information with other neurons. We may safely assume that in a few years computers will be smarter than humans. Most probably they will try to create a perfectly effective world in which economic and social functionality has the highest priority. Sooner or later the combined force of the world's artificial intelligence will try to get rid of what prevents perfect function: Humans. Remember HAL in Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's no longer mere fiction. HAL is about to enter the scene.