Upcoming Concert: An Evening Celebrating Emerging Female Composers

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Shoshana G.

SparkificationI am SUPER excited to be one of the featured writers in Sparkification Productions’ upcoming concert, An Evening Celebrating Emerging Female Composers: A Concert to Promote Gender Parity in Musical Theatre.

It will be held Monday, July 15, at The Helen Mills Event Space and Theatre (137-139 W. 26th Street). It starts at 7:30pm and will last an hour and a half tops. Tickets are $20 (plus small service fee) and you can purchase them here. The $20 ticket price includes a post-concert reception with the artists.

Here we are on Playbill.com!

The concert will feature the songs of Jennifer Lucy Cook, Shoshana Greenberg, Kathryn Hathaway, Janine McGuire, Julia Meinwald, Nicky Phillips and Sarah M. Underwood with contributions by Carmel Dean, Laura Kleinbaum, Tina Lear, Gordon Leary, Jeffery Dennis Smith, and Stephanie Smith.

For those keeping score, that’s three alumna from NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Me, Julia, and Sarah) and three alumna from Barnard College (Me, Janine, and Kathryn). I’m so honored to be part of this amazing group of musical theater writers and women.

There is also an awesome cast of Broadway performers being assembled that includes Erin Davie, Lesli Margherita, Christiane Noll, Alice Ripley, Krysta Rodriguez and Betsy Wolfe.
The evening features Musical Direction by Mary-Mitchell Campbell.

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My 10-Minute Play, “The Rapture of Our Teeth,” Published on Indie Theater Now

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Shoshana G.

DetentionI’m excited to announce that my first play has been published. The Rapture of Our Teeth, a parody of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, is now available to be purchased and read on Indie Theater Now. The 10-minute, about one family’s attempt to prepare for the prophesied end of the world again and again and again, is part of a collection of parody plays that were presented together under the title “Detention #6: Who’s Afraid of Lear’s War Horse?”

You can read the play on Indie Theater Now by clicking here. In order to read it you have to set up an account on the site, which is free, and then buy the collection of three plays, which is only $1.29.

I’m so grateful to Indie Theater Now for this opportunity, as well as to Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts (ESPA) for creating the Detention program and facilitating the publication.

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APRIL IS IN MY MISTRESS’ FACE: RUMINATIONS ON APRIL AND TRAGEDY

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Shoshana G.

I wrote this post 6 years ago, almost to the day. I was trying to process the Virginia Tech Massacre and ended up writing about the month of April. I originally posted it on my graduate school community forum in response to someone named Patrick’s post about tragedies in April. I’m re-posting it here with no edits. Maybe it will help me process what happened in Boston yesterday, even though they are very different. I should add that thankfully I am currently not as dispirited as I was after the Virginia Tech Massacre, for whatever reason. Maybe because I’m not also trying to finish my thesis.

4-23-07
I keep putting off posting on the forum because I’m finishing up my thesis
this week, but I really need to talk about the news events that have
happened in the past week. Maybe it will help me work. I keep using my
writing breaks to read more about the Virginia Tech massacre. This is not
healthy, but it often happens with a horrific event that you keep reading
about it and watching TV footage of it over and over and over, maybe
because you don’t know how else to deal with it.

Perhaps I’ll deal with it by analyzing the month of April. Patrick
brought up the fact that April seems to be a central time for weird and
horrible events. I think there really is something to this. T.S. Eliot
wrote in The Waste Land that “April is the cruellest month.”

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
~The Burial of the Dead, 1-4
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JUSTIN BIEBER, ANNE FRANK, ANGELA CHASE, AND HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Shoshana G.

When people on social media began reacting to Justin Bieber’s comment after visiting Anne Frank’s house, my first thought was about My So-Called Life’s Angela Chase. In the pilot episode of My So-Called Life, Angela’s English teacher asks the class how one would describe Anne Frank. Angela says (out loud without meaning to), “Lucky.” Everyone is taken aback, including the horrified teacher who says, “Why would you say something like that? Anne Frank is a tragic figure! She perished in the Holocaust.” Angela reluctantly responds that she considers Anne Frank lucky because she was trapped in the attic for three years with this guy she really liked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qP8cbF5yzDg

Angela doesn’t see Anne Frank as a tragic figure. She sees her as a teenage girl like herself, one that was probably excited (amidst all the horror) to be in the attic with that boy. Later in the episode, Angela excitedly explains the book to the kind police officer who drives her home from the club: “These Nazis were gonna kill her, so whatever she’d been like with her friends or her teachers– that was just over. She was hiding. But in this other way she wasn’t. She, like, stopped hiding. She was free.”

Justin Beiber’s comment and Angela’s reaction make me think about Holocaust education and how children and teens are exposed to it. I began learning about the Holocaust as early as elementary school. We had weekly classes in Hebrew School, in which we would learn the history and hear stories. I remember listening to a teacher tell us about the last time his parents saw his grandparents. When I was 11, I read all the young adult books about the Holocaust I could get my hands on. I wrote my own stories. Everyone in my sixth grade Hebrew school class was encouraged to see Schindler’s List when it came out in theaters. Learning about the Holocaust was constant and consuming; it was more than history.

Later, I realized that not everyone had had the same education as I did. The Holocaust was relegated to a paragraph or two in our public school history books. We didn’t read Elie Wiesel’s Night until Junior year. It was difficult for me to understand that people were just learning at age 16 what had been such a presence in my education for many years.

If everyone’s Holocaust education is different, it follows that reactions to Anne Frank would vary as well, especially for young people. Angela and Justin both envisioned Anne Frank not as a tragic figure but as a teenager like themselves. Like Angela and, in a way, Justin, Anne Frank has also become a mythic figure–eternally young, frozen in time. How should one respond to Anne Frank? Is she tragic, mythic, a teenager, something else or a combination of the three? Education should include this discussion, but one thing’s for sure: I’m thankful that she was a writer.

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JUST BE YOURSELF: JUDGING WOMEN’S APPEARANCES

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Shoshana G.

“There is simply no comparison between how women’s looks and men’s looks count toward how society values them as humans.” -Irin Carmon

How people talk about women’s looks in our culture is an important conversation to have, and I enjoyed Irin Carmon’s Salon article on Obama calling California Attorney General Kamala Harris “by far, the best looking attorney general.”

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris California Attorney General Kamala Harris

Yes, women who seem young and are considered pretty by men obtain certain advantages in our society. That doesn’t mean that the purportedly progressive president of the United States needs to do his part to enforce all that. (Don’t get me started on “honey,” or “sweetie.” No, I can’t take a fucking compliment.) Yes, people notice and appreciate attractiveness in men and women, which is not incompatible with being smart or successful. But women, above all, are subject to a can’t-win calculus in which the desires of men, rather than their objective qualifications, determine how they’re treated — for better or worse. It applies wherever women exist in public, even when looks are entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

I would add to this article that it’s not just about desire and that looking young is not the blessing most people think it is, especially career-wise. I look roughly 10 years younger than I am, and I often feel that I’m treated young as a result, as well as looked over for opportunities I should be getting because my looks don’t read experienced enough. Many times, people have told me to change my appearance so that I look older: Get an older-looking hair cut (straight hair is best), wear a certain style of clothing, wear make-up.

Too often, the answer to getting what women want in our society is to change one’s appearance to fit a certain type, whether that type is “powerful professional,” “sexy girl,” “sexy professional,” “fresh-out-of-college,” etc. God forbid I’m judged on my professional and life experience rather than the way my hair style reads to others, or what my nails say about me.

The discussion about women’s looks goes beyond whether a woman conforms to a standard of beauty. So much more is being judged, which makes the adage “just be yourself” harder for women to accomplish.

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Enlightened Has Been Cancelled

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Shoshana G.

I was not on Twitter last night to hear about Enlightened‘s cancellation, but I’m glad I heard about it when I did–the next morning at work. While my workplace is not like Abaddon Industries (the company in the show), it still felt like the most appropriate environment to experience this tragic news.

Enlightened fans knew a cancellation was probable, but like the main character Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), we still had hope. When I saw the news, I wasn’t angry, just incredibly sad for the third season that might have been. Also, Enlightened is one of the most emotional shows on television–it’s brought up feelings in me I’ve never felt before in front of a screen–so when the news sunk in I found myself in my work bathroom, crying.

Enlightened bathroomWhat was lovely about that experience was that I had posted to Twitter that I needed to cry in the bathroom over this news, and fans of the show Tweeted that they understood and fully supported that reaction. Enlightened has great fans.

I didn’t watch the first season of Enlightened when it aired in the Fall of 2011 but caught up last summer after reading praise from TV critics, most notably Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker. I had also read that it had a complicated female protagonist, which pretty much guarantees that I’ll like both the show and character. The critics and I were right. I devoured Enlightened‘s ten half hour episodes on HBOGO.com.  The show was miraculously renewed for a second season despite low ratings, even for HBO’s standards, and the second season was just as wonderful as the first, if not better.

Part of the problem with Enlightened is that it’s difficult to describe and, really, not like anything else on television. The series begins with Amy having a nervous breakdown at work, heading to a rehabilitation center in Hawaii, returning to move in with her mother and get her old job back, only to be put in the basement doing data entry. This all happens in the first episode. Enlightened is not about the path to becoming enlightened. It’s about what happens after one becomes enlightened, when a person returns from their journey to change a world that doesn’t want to be changed.

The cold, corporate world is juxtaposed with lyrical speeches and beautiful images, creating haunting, transcendent moments.

Warning: These next paragraphs contain spoilers for the end of the series.
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Requiem for BEN AND KATE and DON’T TRUST THE B— IN APT. 23

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Shoshana G.

Slipping quietly into the night, sitcoms Ben and Kate and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23 stopped airing new episodes a couple weeks ago. Ben and Kate was in the middle of its first season and Don’t Trust the B—- in the middle of its second (the first was short as well since it debuted mid-season). Their cancellations are a TV tragedy. The networks are struggling to create good new material, and they were both fresh, funny, female-centric (and both from female creators) sitcoms that could only have gotten better with age.

Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23 starred Dreama Walker (June) and Krysten Ritter (Chloe) as odd couple roommates. June, a sweet, responsible wanna-be financier moved in with Chloe, who, as it turned out, was a careless bitch. The show mined a good deal of comedy from pitting June’s naivete against Chloe’s manipulating bad-assery, but the show really shined when the two roommates were navigating an unlikely friendship… and whenever James Van Der Beek was on screen. The former Dawson’s Creek star played an exaggerated version of himself who was friends with Chloe and soon June… and then June’s mom via Skype. His charming narcissistic behavior brought another level of zaniness.

JAMES VAN DER BEEK, KRYSTEN RITTER, DREAMA WALKER
Underneath the laughter, however, the show presented an unapologetic version of one’s 20s and 30s that examined transitioning identity, whether it was James figuring out his role as a former TV star, June discovering the joys of new-found singlehood and the pitfalls of suddenly being on the job market, or Chloe realizing that what she gets away with now won’t work forever. It also explored the two facets of feminine identity–the good girl and the mean girl–and what happened when those facets mixed. I’ll miss Don’t Trust the B—-‘s boldness and sass.
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Farewell to 30 Rock

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Shoshana G.

Reading all these farewells to 30 Rock has made me nostalgic. When any show has been on for many seasons, you’re inevitably a different person at the finale than you were when you watched the pilot, assuming you watched it in real time. I didn’t watch the pilot when it aired but began watching shortly thereafter in the middle of the first season. My first episode was either “The Source Awards” or “The Fighting Irish.” It was the spring of 2007, the days before Hulu and before I took the plunge and got DVR (I un-plunged myself and got rid of DVR 3 years ago BECAUSE of Hulu), and I watched whatever NBC.com had on its Website. I was hooked immediately, and caught up on the first season. The first episode I watched live was the hilarious “Fireworks” episode, the first with Will Arnett as Devon Banks.
tv_30_rock07
I was 24 in the spring of 2007, finishing my MFA and living with my friend in a tiny West Village apartment. I can still see the TV screen in our kitchen light up with those fireworks at the end of the “Fireworks” episode. I can still feel myself laughing hysterically as that snippet of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” played in the second episode of season two and recall my amazement at the second season’s Amadeus parody in “Succession” as well as my communion with Liz when she exclaimed, “I’m 37, please don’t make me go to Brooklyn!” even though I was in my 20s.

While 30 Rock took a few episodes to find its footing, the first and second seasons pretty much guaranteed laughter in every episode. They also featured a slightly less crazy Jenna and more of a friendship between her and Liz, a tiny change that I greatly miss. My favorite episode of this early period was “Rosemary’s Baby” with Carrie Fischer, which explored what the strong women TV writers of yesteryear really pass down to the women writers of today and also featured one of my friends as an extra in the climactic “Page-Off.”

I can also recall, however, my disappointment when the third season didn’t live up to the brilliance of the first two. In fact, I didn’t think 30 Rock returned to the brilliance of those first two seasons until last year, the sixth season. When the laughs ended and Liz became more of a joke than someone making jokes, I had little faith that the series would ever be as funny as the first two seasons. But then Liz started taking charge again and even found a love interest better suited for her than season one’s Floyd (Jason Sudeikis), the only boyfriend of hers that I ever liked.

That 30 Rock is going out on top makes it hard to say goodbye but it also makes me ready to say goodbye. If it had petered out as The Office is doing, I would have said my goodbyes long ago and the finale would be meaningless to me. Now, it’s an event with everyone reminiscing about their favorite episodes and lines. While its no longer my favorite show as it was in the first two seasons, it will always be, overall, one of the best, and I’m so thankful that it’s been a part of my life for the last six years.

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Countdown to 2013: 2012 TV

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Shoshana G.

I want to make something clear. I love every show I watch. I do not hate-watch anything, and since I’m not a critic I can choose what I want to see. Still, I enjoy making a top ten list because it helps me spotlight certain shows that I particular loved this year. And, unlike most people, I have no problem with ranking.

leslie and ben
Disclaimer: I only rank shows that I watch. Also, I have tried to avoid spoilers, but you  never know. Read at your own risk…

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Countdown to 2013: 2012 Movies

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Shoshana G.

I saw 34 movies this year–more movies than last year (last year the count was 29)! This reverses what was a continuing downward trend, as this is the first time the number has gone up from the previous year. I believe this has to do with the number of films I saw at MoMA when I was unemployed, as well as a few programs I saw at the Paley Center. I am again counting the movies I saw at MoMA (both old and new) and also the movies I saw on the Hudson River Park pier (although I unfortunately didn’t get to any of those this year, but usually they are counted in this), as well as the operas in HD, the film programs a the Paley Center, and other museum programs and events.

a better life stillThe film A Better Life

I only saw 14 NEW movies this year (the same as last year!)–7 in regular movie theaters (3 more than last year!), 1 at the New York Film Festival (same as last year), 4 at the Paley Center (same as last year) , and 1 at MoMA (3 less than last year). Of the 7 I saw in a regular movie theater, I paid full price (either in NYC or PA) for 1 of them and used passes or got discounts for 6 of them. In total, I saw 14 films a MoMA, 7 at The Paley Center, 1 at The Whitney, 1 at the New York Film Festival, and 2 operas in HD. Of the 34 movies I saw this year, I saw 29 for the first time.

My rating system uses stars and equates as follows: 1=bad, 2=ok 3=really good 4=great.

My favorite new movies (4 stars) this year were:
Moonrise Kingdom

Runners up (3.5 stars):
A Better Life
Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
Ruby Sparks
Ginger and Rosa

My favorite old movies I saw for the first time:
Walkabout
On the Waterfront

My favorite old movies I loved seeing again in the theater/outside:
Titanic (3D IMAX)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (IMAX)

Some Extra Fun Favorites:
Ginger and Rosa Post-screening discussion with Sally Potter, Elle Fanning, and other cast members at the New York Film Festival and my encounter with Sally Potter before the scenning

Worst new movie:
None.

Worst old movie:
Black Swan (Finally saw it and found it well-done but manipulative and a bit exploitative)

The Big List:

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