Irvington Conservatory Theater's production of Urinetown: The Musical proves, through an apocalyptic Fremont that has been in a 20-year drought where the government has banned private toilets, that you should always follow you heart. From the beginning, the musical’s storyline is imbedded into various songs, giving a cheerful tone to the production, but is still rich in detail. The constant repetition in the title song builds the suspense, making the audience wonder what Urinetown really is. While the name may seem immature, the musical deals with monopolies, bureaucracy, and love. A key character who educates the audience about love is Hope Caldwell, who tends to see the good in everyone but finds herself between her father and her own love.
To balance out the atmosphere, comedic remarks from Officer and Little Sally lighten the mood and provide an outsider’s point-of-view on the situation. Both of these characters act more as narrators; thus, making the production more interactive and lively. The musical keeps you at the edge of your seat until the very last second, proving that things can change very unexpectedly and quickly. Matt Ballin’s rendition of Greg Kotis’ play should be on the watch list as it reveals that you should work to help everyone not just yourself and that sometimes an evil is better than a worse evil.
The story begins in “Catfish Row” a small coastal town based on the real town of Cabbage Row in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1920’s. The main protagonist of the story and leading man is Porgy, a disabled beggar man who is known for riding his goat cart around Charleston. Bess is the leading lady of the opera and is in an unhealthy relationship with Crown, a powerful, violent, alcoholic, short-tempered stevedore (dockworker). Act I starts with a lullaby being sang to a small baby by a young mother named Clara, as she sings the men of Catfish Row prepare for a crap game, prior to the game, Crown purchases whisky and Cocaine from the Sportin’ Life, the local drug dealer of the town, during the crap game, Crown who is very drunk kills a local man named Robbins, Crown flees Catfish Row and leaves Bess to fend for herself. Sportin’ Life who is attracted to Bess, he gives her cocaine and asks her to join him in New York, Bess refuses and is now alone, she has no where to go, she is rejected by all of the Catfish Row resident, all except for Porgy who takes her in. A funeral takes place for Robbins, Serena, Robbins’ wife acts very coldly towards Bess when she offers her donation to help pay for Robbins’s funeral cost until Bess explains that she is no longer with Crown, and now lives with Porgy. Soon after, a detective enters and tells Serena that if...
The musical was performed in the Cumberland Hall Auditorium at Fayetteville Technical Community College. It
thesis of how the musical brought our inner child out to realize our true struggles in life.
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play founded on the premise of conflicting cultures. Blanche and Stanley, the main antagonists of the play, have been brought up to harbour and preserve extremely disparate notions, to such an extent that their incompatibility becomes a recurring theme within the story. Indeed, their differing values and principles becomes the ultimate cause of antagonism, as it is their conflicting views that fuels the tension already brewing within the Kowalski household. Blanche, a woman disillusioned with the passing of youth and the dejection that loneliness inflicts upon its unwilling victims, breezes into her sister's modest home with the air and grace of a woman imbued with insecurity and abandonment. Her disapproval, concerning Stella's state of residence, is contrived in the face of a culture that disagrees with the old-fashioned principles of the southern plantations, a place that socialised Blanche to behave with the superior demeanour of a woman brain-washed into right-wing conservatism. Incomparably, she represents the old-world of the south, whilst Stanley is the face of a technology driven, machine fuelled, urbanised new-world that is erected on the foundations of immigration and cultural diversity. New Orleans provides such a setting for the play, emphasising the bygone attitude of Blanche whose refusal to part with the archaic morals of her past simply reiterates her lack of social awareness. In stark contrast Stanley epitomises the urban grit of modern society, revealed by his poker nights, primitive tendencies and resentment towards Blanche. ...
Based solely on what I’ve heard and my common understanding of comedies, I fully expect Noises Off to be a humorous and farcical peace. I’m the most excited to see how Noises Off plays to the expectations I have set forth for a comedy piece. I’m interested to see how the play takes a hold of comedy and in what direction the jokes are going to go. Will the jokes be sexual innuendos, satirical, musical comedy, insults, spoofs? Who knows! That’s the beauty of theatre, and its many avenues of expression. I have full faith Noises Off will display and satisfy most, if not all, of these possibilities for comedy. I’m personally most anxious to see the display of the characters and how each of them approaches their comedy. Each character can be completely
“And the Band Played On” was an HBO movie that illustrated the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s. The movie touched on subjects concerning the reaction of the gay community, the heterosexual community, and the medical community. It showed not only the research in AIDS, but also the way that the US government dealt with it. The movie expressed the consequences the gay community suffered, the plight of the medical community in researching the disease, and the issue of government response to it.
It all began the previous summer. Lana, being a huge Broadway enthusiast, saved up enough money to buy tickets for BroadwayCon, which was a Broadway convention. There were no words that could describe how ecstatic she felt as she entered the building. Show tunes filled the air. To her right, Patti Lupone was signing autographs. To her left, they were selling Broadway merchandise. Up ahead, Lin-Manuel Miranda was performing “My Shot” from Hamilton. There were people sharing their different musical obsessions everywhere. Lana was truly in heaven.
After two world wars, the balance of power between the genders in America had completely shifted. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a harsh, yet powerful play that exposes the reality of the gender struggle. Williams illustrates society’s changing attitudes towards masculinity and femininity through his eloquent use of dramatic devices such as characterization, dialogue, setting, symbolism, and foreshadowing.
A Streetcar Named Desire sets the decaying values of the antebellum South against those of the new America. The civil, kindly ways of Blanche’s past are a marked contrast to the rough, dynamic New Orleans inhabited by Stella and Stanley, which leads Tennessee Williams’s “tragedy of incomprehension” (qtd. in Alder, 48). The central protagonist, Blanche, has many flaws; she lies, is vain and deceitful, yet can be witty and sardonic. These multifaceted layers balance what Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche in the first stage production in 1947, “saw as her ‘pathetic elegance’ . . . ‘indomitable spirit and ‘innate tenderness’” (Alder 49). Through a connected sequence of vignettes, our performance presented a deconstruction of Blanche that revealed the lack of comprehension and understanding her different facets and personas created. Initially Blanche is aware of what she is doing and reveals
It was on March 31st, I went to see The Forbidden Broadway starting at 8pm at the Seminole Theater, located in Homestead Florida. Forbidden Broadway is a parody of classical movies and Disney cartoons. Therefore, it tells you it is going to be a comedy show. This shows was written in 1982 by Gerard Alessandrini and it is performed every year. This musical comedy is also updated every year. And some of the performers, who are excellent and well know performers were Gina Kreiezmar, Kevin McGlynn, Jeanne Montano and Graid Laurie. The one thing that I did not like with the performance note is because it did not list any of the plays that were going to be played or gives any summary about the plays. And I did not really like that and I was like maybe because it is a popular show, so people might know what it is going to be about. Anyway, it should have a kind of summary to let people know what will be performed.
Miller, D. A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Print.
Theatre has heavily evolved over the past 100 years, particularly Musical Theatre- a subgenre of theatre in which the storyline is conveyed relying on songs and lyrics rather than dialogue. From its origination in Athens, musical theatre has spread across the world and is a popular form of entertainment today. This essay will discuss the evolution and change of musical theatre from 1980-2016, primarily focusing on Broadway (New York) and the West End (London). It will consider in depth, the time periods of: The 1980s: “Brit Hits”- the influence of European mega musicals, the 1990s: “The downfall of musicals”- what failed and what redeemed, and the 2000s/2010s: “The Resurgence of musicals”- including the rise of pop and movie musicals. Concluding
Tennessee Williams has mastered the idea of plastic theater throughout the plays he was written and “A Streetcar Named Desire” is no different. He incorporates many elements of plastic theater throughout this play to take you through a journey unlike any other. One of the main elements of plastic theater that is heavily used is the music. The music plays a vital role in this play in setting the moods for each scene. The “Blue Piano” and The “Varsouviana Polka” are prime examples for playing major roles in the scenes Williams used them in.
Wells, E A. (2011) West Side Story Cultural Perspectives on an American musical. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Tennessee Williams, an American theater writer, has quickly made a great play A Streetcar Named Desire which reflect the society in 1950s as both social and art work, all included references to elements of his life such as mental instability and . Williams’s character Blanche DuBois was a feeble lady who loves fantasy and dependence on man. According to the play, Blanche “hurls” her continually denied love out into the world, only to have that love revisit her in the form of suffering(1). Today we find ourselves in a very different world than the people who lived in 1950s. It should also be admitted that the views of amphoteric relationship are obviously z