All posts tagged News
Oliver discusses the key news items. Topics covered include: Paramour Opening, Spring Awakening Kickstarter, Tuck Everlasting Closing, Dear Evan Hansen’s Broadway Transfer and last weekend’s Theatre World, Lilly, and OBIE Awards.
read moreWelcome to The OHenry Report – our brand new theater podcast!
On the OHenry Report, we will be giving you the same in depth analysis we do on the blog, but we’ll have the added benefit of being able to invite guests on the show!
In Episode 1, Oliver Roth and Chris Schembra discuss the key takeaways from the 2016 Tony Award Nominations. Topics covered include: Hamilton, snubs, PR stunts and an analysis of the Lead Actor in a Musical category.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Broadway news is hard to sort through. There’s Playbill, and Theater Mania, and BroadwayWorld, and Broadway.com, and NYTimes ArtsBeat…the list goes on and on. Keeping up with the headlines from all of these news sources is often overwhelming. We don’t think it should be. Follow us on twitter for latest Broadway news and analysis.
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“An Upset,” a one-act play by David Auburn first seen in New York in 2008, is being revived around the city timed to the Open, including three shows at 99 Bowery beginning Sept. 12.
“It’s always hard to put a finger on why something is suddenly in the zeitgeist,” said Ruhl, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. “I don’t know why it is happening with tennis in theater right now. But for me, while researching the Bush dynasty, I realized tennis is such a big part of their lives and a wonderful metaphor for family competition and sibling rivalry.”
In “Scenes From Court Life,” Greg Keller plays George W. Bush as a more shrewd politician than his brother Jeb but an inferior tennis player.
“Athletes are almost another species to playwrights,” Keller said. “The writer’s world is so subjective, but for athletes there is always a winner and a loser.”
Tennis holds undeniable appeal for the theater. For starters, it can encompass widely different settings, including the Bush family compound, the public courts of the Lower East Side and Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Tennis, Keller said, is also “one-on-one, but you are not physically touching each other like in boxing.”
He added, “You are in your own little world.”
Bragen has written other works about tennis, including a monologue called “Game, Set, Match.” He said the sport offered intimacy and isolation — great fodder for writers.
“There’s a kind of dance that I feel as a player, but you are alone in your own head at the same time you are connected to other person,” Bragen said.
Ruhl said she liked the combat mixed with decorum, “the formality within the structure of competition.”
Ryan Sweeney, who played Division I tennis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is producing and starring in “An Upset,” said, “Tennis is a lonely sport, and Auburn’s script touches on the players’ vulnerabilities.”
