Tony Nominations 2014

Show Nominees:

BEST MUSICAL
“After Midnight”
“Aladdin”
“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”
“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”

BEST PLAY
“Act One”
“All the Way”
“Casa Valentina”
“Mothers and Sons”
“Outside Mullingar”

BEST REVIVAL — MUSICAL
“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”
“Les Misérables”
“Violet”

BEST REVIVAL — PLAY
“The Cripple of Inishmaan”
“The Glass Menagerie”
“A Raisin in the Sun”
“Twelfth Night”

Number of individual Nominations by production:

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” – 10
“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” – 8
“After Midnight” – 7
“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” – 7
“The Glass Menagerie” – 7
“Twelfth Night” – 7
“Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical” – 6
“The Cripple of Inishmaan” – 6
“Act One” – 5
“Aladdin” – 5
“A Raisin in the Sun” – 5
“The Bridges of Madison County” – 4
“Casa Valentina” – 4
“Machinal” – 4
“Rocky” – 4
“Violet” – 4
“Les Misérables” – 3
“All The Way” – 2
“Cabaret” – 2
“If/Then” – 2
“Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” – 2
“Mothers and Sons” – 2
“Of Mice and Men” – 2
“A Night with Janis Joplin” – 1
“Outside Mullingar” – 1
“Richard III” – 1
“The Velocity of Autumn” – 1

Shakespeare's Birthday Present

Tomorrow every living dramatist will celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. London’s Globe theatre will celebrate this event for a whole year. It plans to take its latest production to every nation on Earth. "Hamlet" will open this Wednesday - Shakespeare's birthday - with the first of three performances at the Globe, a reconstructed Elizabethan playhouse beside the River Thames. Then the cast of 12 and its four-person crew will board a schooner for Amsterdam, beginning a journey that will take them to seven continents by plane, boat, train, bus and jeep. The tour is scheduled to last two years, finishing back at the Globe on April 23, 2016 -- the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The itinerary is still a work in progress, but performances across Europe are already fixed, followed by tours of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Padlocked Bridges

I took this picture last November in Cologne: Millions of padlocks attached to a bridge, put there by lovers who threw the keys into the river.

In recent years, padlocks attached to bridge railings have become tokens of couples safeguarding their love and the locks have been showing up on bridges from Florence to Montevideo, from Paris to Moscow, from Denmark to China. Until about a decade ago, however, those locks were confined to a single pedestrian bridge in the Serbian resort town of Vrnjacka Banja. In the legend surrounding the bridge and the padlock tradition, a schoolmistress named Nada would meet her lover, a army officer named Relja, on the bridge where they pledged their love in the days before World War I. The soldier went on to fight the Germans at the Thessaloniki front in Greece, where he found a new love and married her. Nada is said to have died of sadness and grief. Nada's tale of grief inspired young couples determined not to abandon one another to begin writing their names on padlocks and chaining them to the fence of the bridge where Nada and Relja swore their devotion. Serb couples then sealed their promises by tossing the keys into the clear spring-like Vrnjacka River below. It remained a local phenomenon until Desanka Maksimovic, a noted Serb poet who died in 1993, heard the story of the bridge's lore and wrote one of her most beautiful poems "A Prayer for Love." The poem has stoked the romance of the bridge. A great pop song about this waits for its creator.

It Takes Work

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."

Emile Zola

A Social Network For Playwrights

I'm not exactly a social media buff.  Still I joined Stage32 recently. It is a network dedicated to helping film, television and theater creatives from all over the world connect. With over a quarter million members from every country on the planet, Stage 32 promises to be populated with some of the most creative people on earth. Stage 32 is has been called “LinkedIn meets Facebook for people who work in film, television or theater”. It's free, so it's worth a try to make career altering connections.

Walking And Thinking

Some of the finest thinkers in history were enthusiastic walkers: Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau.  Rousseau says in his Confessions, when you walk all is possible. Your future is as open as the sky in front of you. And if you walk several hours, you can escape your identity. There is a moment when you walk several hours that you are only a body walking. Only that. You are nobody. You have no history. You have no identity. You have no past. You have no future. You are only a body walking. Nietzsche conceived all his books during his long walks. "It is only ideas gained from walking," he said, "that have any worth." Now a French philosopher, Frédéric Gros, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, wrote a highly recommendable book about walking thinkers and thinking walkers: A Philosophy Of Walking.

Ugly?

Last week Meryl Streep received an honorary doctorate by the Indiana University Bloomington. In her acceptance speech she said: "I think I was probably like every other girl who puts on a princess dress and expects everyone to pay full and total attention. And most of us grow out of that. [At Vassar College] I was always in plays, but I thought it was vain to be an actress. Plus, I thought I was too ugly to be an actress. Glasses weren't fabulous then." She also remembered that she hated her nose. The doctorate was awarded to her "for her extraordinary talents, her highly visible place in the arts and her role as a powerful advocate for women".

Good Writing Ain't Easy

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Maya Angelou

Thoughts While Driving Home

Was I clever enough? Was I charming?

Did I make at least one good pun?

Was I disconcerting? Disarming?

Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?

John Updike

Jersey Boys, The Movie

An easter egg: The first glimpse on the film version of Jersey Boys.

Based on the hit Broadway show, Clint Eastwood's take on the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons digs at the gangland drama behind the 60s crooners success. The film, which stars Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza and Christopher Walken, is released in June 2014.