The Process

Oh! How I love the creative process, and seeing it come together, especially when it requires teamwork, group thinking, and massive perfectionism to make something truly great. Here is a video of the recording of the musical Company, by the original cast, which is a musical whose music I love, although, damn if I didn’t miss the revival with Raul Esparza last season.

See Stephen Sondheim comment on West Side Story and his career as a composer, not a lyricist, at the end.

. . .and here’s the incomparable Elaine Stritch, fighting through Sondheim’s “Ladies Who Lunch” (she nails it in the end):

I love it!

 

Marcel Marceau, dead

I don’t know how it started, but no older than six or seven years of age, my sister and I began a what became a long-standing joke about Marcel Marceau. He became one of our strange, witty, inside references as a result of our early exposure to public television. The culmination of this joke came in 2003, when we took the opportunity to see the mime perform at George Street Playhouse, near Rutgers, where my sister was attending, as a stop on his final world tour. Much isn’t thought of the art of miming, but reading this quote led me to share that it’s more than just a series parlor tricks into the imaginary. Like a musician or a photographer, Marceau saw his craft as a venue to speak without words:

For Marceau, mime had a philosophical and political level.

One of his most famous sketches was “The Cage,” in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape.

In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.

“I am a progressive, a man who deals for peace, and who has struggled for enlightenment in the world. I am not just an entertainer,” he said.

“I want to be a man who will represent as an active witness my time, and who wants to say, without words, my feelings about the world.”

Rest in Peace!

edited to include:George Street Playhouse

 

If My Friends Could See Me Now: Border/Clash at the Culture Project

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