Countdown to 2014: 2013 Theater

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Shoshana G.

Last year I saw 99 shows/readings/concerts. This year I saw 90— 9 less than last year. I am sad that the number is so low this year, especially when I’ve been blogging and getting a good amount of ticket offers. I did do a lot of non-theater activities this year, way more than usual, and I don’t go to too many friends’ concerts anymore, mostly because they are now all so late!

This Clement WorldThis Clement World. Credit: Carly McCollow

I saw most of these shows for free and paid a student or discount rate for the others (I actually only paid for 16 of them–the same as last year–and 3 were with family). For the first time in many years, I did not see any show more than once. I sang in 4 of these concerts and my work was featured in 1 of them. 18 performances were connected to blog posts I wrote for two websites.

In the past, I’ve done a star rating system, but since I know people involved in many of these shows, I’ve done away with that and just highlighted my favorites.  After the favorites is the HUGE list of everything I saw. Then, I have listed some fun panels, exhibits, and events I also attended this year.

Top 10 Favorites (in no order, I swear):
Les Troyens (Metropolitan Opera)
This Clement World (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
Talley’s Folly (Roundabout)
Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (Kazino)
A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep)
Then She Fell (Third Rail Projects)
I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road (City Center Encores)
The Tempest (The Public- Public Works)
Fun Home (Public Theater)
The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons)

Runners Up (Also in no order):
Isaac’s Eye (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
SAGA (Wakka Wakka at Baruch)
Die Frau Ohne Schatten (Metropolitan Opera)
It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman (City Center Encores)
Old Hats (Signature)
Nobody Loves You (Second Stage Theatre)
The Flick (Playwrights Horizons)
The Good Person of Szechwan (Public Theater)
Unlocked (Prospect Theater Company)
Marie Antoinette (Soho Rep)

The Big List:

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Chorus Concerts!

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Shoshana G.

My chorus, Essential Voices USA, is in the midst of a busy concert season.

Last week, we celebrated the great lyricist Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, Fiorello!) at our Composer Speaks: Reason to Be Thankful event. Composers Larry Hochman, Roberto Sierra, John Glover, and librettist Kelley Rourke joined Sheldon on the stage for interviews after we sang their pieces.card-2013-12-10Sheldon has been my favorite lyricist for many years, not only because his lyrics are the perfect combination of brevity, wit, and feeling but he is kind and always eager to talk to fans and fellow theater people. During our first conversation back in 2007 we discussed productions of Fiddler on the Roof in Israel, and every subsequent encounter has been just as meaningful.

Me and Sheldon Harnick

 This week, my chorus sings with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall for “Under the Mistletoe with Ashley Brown.” We are singing a wide array of Christmas music from traditional carols to contemporary holiday hits. I’m looking forward to singing at Carnegie Hall once again with so many consummate musicians, both within my chorus and those with whom we are collaborating.

Pops-Dec-2013-fbTickets are still available for this concert here.

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An Evening Celebrating Emerging Female Composers Concert Recap, Videos, and more!

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Shoshana G.

Sparkification

On Monday, July 15, I was honored to be one of the seven featured musical theater writers in Sparkification Productions’ An Evening Celebrating Emerging Female Composers. It was a lovely concert with wonderful women writers and singers. The great Mary-Mitchell Campbell music-directed, and a slate of Broadway performers sang two songs by each writer. Sierra Boggess (The Little Mermaid, Master Class) sang “New Year’s,” my song with composer Tina Lear, and Christiane Noll (Ragtime, Chaplin) sang “The Decay,” my song with composer Jeffrey Dennis Smith.

Check out the videos:

It was thrilling to have these brilliant performers sing these songs, not just because I’ve long admired their work but because it reminded me of how far these songs have come. Here’s some history for those of you who enjoy learning about the origins of songs…

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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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