Podcast
Kerry Butler
Listen to Tony Award nominee Kerry Butler talk about performing for ice cream, her common ground with Daniel Day-Lewis, and her personal connection to her role in THE CALL.
Trailer
THE CALL
Interview
TheaterMania exclusive interview with Michael Greif, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie
Podcast
Tanya Barfield and Leigh Silverman
Trailer
Backstage with... Louisa Krause
Interview
An Interview with the Creators of "Far From Heaven"
Why Far From Heaven? Michael Korie: In New York, it’s always the right time for a musical about repressed homosexuality, spousal abuse, and racial politics. Now is particularly the right time because in a stealthy way it’s about today. My goal is to create musicals about the America we live in but without making it obvious. The audience at first believes it’s seeing a period piece. Then the realization creeps up, ‘Oh, this all still happens!’
Essay
Tim Sanford on "Far From Heaven"
The guidelines of our literary department state that we do not accept dramatic adaptations from other sources, except for musicals. As a writer’s theater, we often find the authorial voice becomes commingled or overshadowed by the originating writer in straight adaptations. But the form of the musical theater is essentially synthetic (made, not observed) and depends on the collaborative synergy of its creators to come into being. The best musicals find their originality and their voice through transformation. It usually behooves the creators to steer clear of widely known or beloved novels or films where an audience might have firmly held preconceptions about the source. Musicals based on somewhat more obscure sources usually provide the creators more artistic leeway.
Essay
The American Voice: A Brief History of Adaptation
There seems to be a modern complaint about musicals today that you can’t throw a stone down Broadway without hitting a marquee for a show adapted from a recent hit film. As often as not, these productions are seen as a quick fix for the instant marketing and branding of commercial enterprises rather than original shows. However, adaptation in musicals is nothing new, and people have been turning to other sources for a very long time. What’s often overlooked is that the process of adaptation, at its best, finds ways to expand the form of the musical and deepen the manner in which these stories explore our essential humanity.
Essay
Backstory: Running in Sirk-les
“It was a simpler time” rings the mantra of the Greatest Generation when reflecting upon the American 1950s. Enshrined in our memories by iconic shows like “Leave it to Beaver” and “I Love Lucy,” the 1950s housewife has assumed an almost mythical presence in our cultural consciousness, lamenting an easier time of economic prosperity when neighbors greeted one another in their driveways, kids played stickball in the streets till dusk and the idyllic June Cleaver eagerly awaited her husband’s return from work with a plate of piping hot dinner in her carefully manicured hand.